Undergrowth
by TheErrantShrew
Summary: While returning stolen Materia, Vincent Valentine discovers the true depths of depravity to which the human condition can sink. Together he and Yuffie Kisaragi reveal the new world's insidious secrets, and pieces of themselves they'd never have thought possible. (WARNING: Contains unsettling themes; gradual Yuffentine and CloTi.)
1. I: Beneath the Skin

**I**

* * *

A thick, stagnant overcast pooled over Edge.  
The clouds were grey, the buildings were colourless, but the city's heart was black.

Deep within its many sprawling arteries strode a lonely man, wreathed in a long, tattered vermillion cloth. The noxious fumes of industry suffocated the air, but the true poison which infected the pale-faced gunslinger was the society through which he walked. Around him, the people were strewn across the roadsides like refuse of flesh and bone. Plundered waste skips were left dilapidated and agape, their foetid contents hauled away in tracks of slime for the desperate to dissect. There was a riotous din across the street as men congregated like carrion crows around a brawl. This area had been so destitute that dignity and pride were the only currency left, and it seemed one of those men had come to collect a debt here in the Grimhaven District.

Vincent Valentine was beginning to have second thoughts about being there, but theft was theft.

The stolen Materia was nestled inside his mantle, its ethereal yellow glow concealed well from view. The crowd opposite from him split open, punctured by the collapse of a man choking up blood onto the curb. The fighter was half-nude, his sinewy upper body pocked with abrasions and scars. Judging from the loose necklace of canines, molars and incisors along the road, Vincent didn't enjoy imagining what their lengths would be for something as valuable as his own cargo. The jeering mob flocked around the combatants again, shielding him from the gruesome spectacle of the second man sinking his thumb into the other's eye.

Vagrant traders called out to him, some wily, others aggressive, but not one of them fruitful.  
Vincent continued on his way, ignorant to the questionable trinkets on display.

He wandered deeper into the run-down district. Salacious cat-calls beckoned to him from windowsills tinged with red lights and peppered with diseased, crooning crones out for easy profit. There was no response from him; they preyed on the depraved and the needy, not the dead. They would receive nothing from him, an outlandish spectre who haunted through the twisting pathways of Edge's most infamous cesspit. The closer Vincent pressed on to his destination, the warmer and seedier the atmosphere became. He promised himself that this would be the final time that he intervened in Yuffie's poor life decisions.

Finally, the traveller came upon a large, rusted gate. It was stowed away in the mouth of an alley, mounted upon a flight of two concrete steps. Two heavy-set men, each with necks sunken into great, seething canvasses of brawn, barged forward to bar Vincent's way. Leather jackets, dark jeans, and rugged jaws - the pair of them could easily have been congenital twins, bred by the same live-or-die code of life that had stitched together so many of these other forsaken souls.

"Hey, the nineties were ten years ago, freak." One of them lifted his chin, oozing an intimidation that never quite found its mark upon a corpse. The only difference between the two was that the one who spoke had a burn scar melted just above his right brow in the template of a playing card suit - a spade. His opposite number had a club mark printed in stringent white against the deep colouration of his skin, just above the left brow. Their shaven scalps were stitched by an identical, vertical seam that ran from the nape of their necks to their foreheads, appearing like burly, organic scarecrows.

"You don't wanna be here, man," the other chuckled dryly at the first's joke, licking along rows of unkempt teeth. "Pack that string-bean ass up, and lose it."

Vincent eyed them each in turn, silent and contemplative. He wasn't there to cause a scene, although having witnessed what he had, the gunslinger wasn't entirely sure what would constitute one. The three barrels of Cerberus reared their loaded fangs towards the nearest man's kneecap: they were aimed to maim and incapacitate, not to kill. He allowed a sliver of the Materia's light to filter through a gap in his cloak, keeping himself guarded, his actions furtive throughout.

Begrudgingly, the giants lumbered aside.  
Vincent drifted between them, not a word exchanged, and not a bullet wasted.

Inside, the den reeked of subhuman squalor. There was a dankness to the hollowed-out living quarters, a musty, foul odour lining the air. The dead man peered around with gall at the array of steel cages littering the room, and disquiet rooted itself in his stomach. The Materia which he had brought back to this group - the _Manipulate_ Materia - made sense. He had seen the recesses of the world, but there was no lower rung than this. Moreover, just _how_ and _why_ Yuffie of all people had managed to infiltrate, or perhaps even strike up some accord with this contemptible scum, had only deepened his need for answers. Nerves numbed by years of morbid slumber flickered to life, and Vincent's synapses twitched and fired through his brain with the threat that everything here was _wrong_.

The lanky streak before him, clothed in a mussed and dirty suit, lounged on the hind legs of a chair. He had a darker, tanned pigmentation that was stretched taut with cheap, lazy lift operations, and his jawline was festooned with black facial hair. There were others in the room, glowering at him with predatory interest as they each filed through grubby coins, rapped battered shoes with impatience, and calculated their moments, but Vincent had always borne the lesson that the man with the desk was the man who had the authority - and on that personal moral alone, he strolled fearlessly towards the grinning fiend.

"Ah," the so-called businessman clapped his hands, his voice guttural, foreign and patchy. "Welcome! They address me to Owl - come to buy, friend?"

"What do you have?" Vincent asked.

"Why, potions and remedies, of course!" Owl's eyes twinkled with lies against the dim strip of light overhead. "Or, we could cut the bullshit." He gestured back from where Vincent had first set foot inside, the ageless experiment unmoved by his dramatics. "Since you have been met with Hawk and Kestrel at the door and passed by them, you must either be having something very important to us - or something very important is going from you. Which is it?"

Vincent didn't utter anything in reply.  
The Manipulate Materia sliced through the scarlet folds of his garments, in a mutually recognised promise.

"You know... we aren't a charity," Owl leaned forward, all four chair legs squealing against the stone. "You must want a good potion for your troubling, then?"

"Potions are all you sell?" Vincent probed, scrutinising every vein across the trader's forehead as they throbbed dishonestly.

"Of a sort." Owl's chuckle was filthy, blighted by horrible knowledge. "There are much different potions, my friend. Potions to stop blood, in example, or to pick up your energy from a down. The 'potions' we sell here are highly good," he tongued against his upper lip, "yes, _shit_ fine potions. They help, ah... loosen up boredom, or loneliness. They change a man's life in a single night! Or a year. Or much years, if you have a right price - _heh, heh_..."

"Show me." The gunslinger was ever-wary, and mapped out the surroundings. There was a cluster of lowlifes who reacted immediately to their superior's nod, and scrambled to drag aside a heavy barricade. It appeared to be composed of soldered girders in a skin of corrugated metal, with the same dimensions as the frame of bookshelves. As the three men dragged it out of the way, a hidden passageway that led down into the basement revealed itself. The murk awaited them, blowing a muggy breeze across Vincent from its depths. It was uncomfortable, and gradually worsened as they descended into it.

Something ominous lingered in that motionless, sticky air.  
Something that prickled Vincent's skin and soul, all at once.

 _'This is wrong',_ it said. ' _Turn back, go away, this is wrong.'_

"Health junkies always speak to me like, ' _organic, organic - is always with organic!_ '" Owl ranted in his shredded, pigeon grasp of the local dialect. "But you don't see poor little farmer-man on fronts of huge stores, don't you? It is always the fast food! People come for quick, come for easy... Yes, you are a quick and easy man! I see in your clothes, in your skin! Haven't seen much sun in life, eh? Is okay, friend, neither have much of us who spent the lives in a Midgar slums!"

Vincent didn't acknowledge him, stoic to the point of living stone. They entered into a cellar, which had a string of three mobile boilers plugged into a narrow carpet of wiring and electrical sockets. Their two faces were set towards cells, barred by iron, three on either side of the room. Soft, unconscious moans punctuated the low thrumming of the heaters, and Vincent became sickened - _incensed_ \- by their contents. Inside each lay young women, naked and glistening with sweat, cramped together like battery hens in an iniquitous pit of neglect. They were gaunt, dreaming flesh-mannequins drugged into submission for the next auction, their bodies blotched with the telltale stains of excessive perspiration. The stench of body odour swamped the cellar, bringing to Vincent's mind the vivid and repugnant memories of the past. Not since that grotesque _excuse_ of a scientist had he witnessed such a crude lack of morality.

"You must excuse the smell," Owl continued, sidling past the hordes nonchalant towards their condition. "We warm them lots, they sweat lots. Lots of human body is water, yes? We bring it out, and the girls stay thin and gorgeous for high pleasure," he explained, toeing across an exposed circuit. " _Everybody_ wins."

 _'Everybody_?'

Vincent struggled to stomach his distaste. If he clipped a bullet through this man's skull, it would indeed be a 'quick and easy' escape. There would be no justice. This trafficker - this _monster_ \- could not survive in Edge with such severe speech restrictions, nor his asininity. There had to be another party involved. Although his fingers skirted against the holster of his weapon, Vincent roamed across the heaters with a calm vehemence, perfectly disguised as disinterest.

"Since when could you install Materia into electrical appliances?" The dead man inclined his head towards the devices, the surfaces of which were each embedded with a yellow and purple sphere. He suspected that the alternate-coloured orbs were ' _All'_ , which strengthened the effects across a range of victims.

"Ah," Owl hummed with content, swatting his hand down upon a heater's robust head. "They are _very_ good, my friends are."

"Who are they?" All pretence of harmony was stripped away from Vincent's callous, penetrative stare.

Owl pursed his lips, mulling over the situation. These questions were easing their way into an undesirable territory. Catching Vincent's expression, the man sneered in understanding. They didn't need to explain their positions now. No longer were they amiable partners, hatching out payment terms and bartering over which sack of meat to lend out for a time. Vincent's forefinger rested, itchy, against Cerberus's trigger. The criminal, now caught, snorted in disbelief.

"Just friends." He was shady, unctuous. Untrustworthy.

There was no possibility of the gunslinger accepting that alone.

"Who are they?" Vincent levelled his firearm in a red flare, its three hollow eyes leering towards Owl. The man turned his gaze briefly, thoughtfully towards the exit as thoughts of flight or shouts for assistance from above pulsed through the two. They were slain swiftly by a click of the gun, snapping him to reality.

"You wouldn't _kill_ me," Owl's spindly arms rose in a casual surrender, speaking nothing of respect for the intruder. "You're good man! Very nice man!"

"What you have abused most will die first," Vincent hissed. His brow dripped. "Then we'll see."

"Oh! You want to shoot at a hand of whores?" Owl's sight was unsteady, nervous, flittering from Cerberus, to Vincent, and away towards the caged girls. He slacked in laughter, twisted and tumbled over Vincent's misinterpreted words. "You're one of those! Is okay, we offer for men like you! Go ahead, pick a fill!"

"I'm not talking about them," the ghostly being lowered his aim: down past Owl's chest, past his stomach. It hovered just below his abdomen. " _Talk_."

"You will not... Please!" The thug's face contorted into an unsightly mask of fear. "Let us discuss, please - you can have a whole, uh," he nodded towards a cell, " _this_ much of them, eh? All for yourself, no charges! No charges for you - a promise! They don't know how to be, uh... _people_ , you know? Is best for them, is what they know, _all_ they know! Taste one for yourself, is all good quality!" Suddenly, Owl barked with rabid ferocity in a language Vincent could not translate, battering against the bars. It was directed towards the girls, that much he knew - the name _Natasha_ was the only cogent thing that spluttered from his lips.

"Give me their names," Vincent demanded, his sympathy having never existed to begin with.

"Is not me, my friend!" Owl lashed out, voice cracking in panic. "I don't... I don't do this, I just sell! I don't take them, I don't... uh, I do not the... okay?"

" _Names_ ," his interrogator growled again, accented with venom. This time there would be no tolerance.

"Don... _fuck_ , fine!" Owl whimpered, sunken to defeat. "Is- is Don Santeo, okay? Now, please, we talk about this...!"  
He thought with _that_ , he cherished _that_ , and he lived by _that_.  
It was obvious. _That_ was a gnarled, repugnant set of particular organs.

Cerberus roared, recoiling stiffly in Vincent's hand. Burned sulphur swept up in a sallow plume from the gunshot, ripping anguish from the treacherous man's throat. Owl crumpled onto the ground, an obscene slew dribbling out of an equally obscene mouth. Shivering hands grasped at what was no longer there, a mutilated and unrecognisable cavern between his squirming thighs. Blood, ceaseless and explicit, bubbled between his scrabbling, scrawny fingers.

Vincent threw his cloak around himself, head canted towards the commotion upstairs.


	2. II: The Death and the Rose

**II**

* * *

"You... _fuck you,_ " Owl sobbed.

A crown of bullets exploded from Cerberus, blowing through the first heater. Shrapnel pinwheeled across the corridor in molten rain, igniting a nova of sparks and winking shards of machinery. Two cells awakened in slow horror from their trance, the nightmare hypnosis finally waning from their minds. The girls - malnourished, afraid and immodest - grasped onto one another's bare figures, fumbling timidly in their confines.

"E-everyone, get down here no-w...! _Aughh_...! Fuck you, man! _Fu-ahh...ck_...!"

Vincent kicked the reprehensible parasite away from himself.

A second buckshot resonated through the cellar, and another heater span away violently. A fiery globe inflated from the gash in its side. The girls in the third and fourth cages stirred with a similar, gradual clarity, liberated from the Materia. As they began to apprehend the situation, some wept, distraught; others jostled and elbowed each other away, shrieking blood-curdling cries for help; others simply crouched there quietly, dizzy, empty, and mortified.

The final heater was thrust up against the far wall, lifeless and cratered with smouldering wounds. Six cages' worth of hostage daughters, and sisters and mothers erupted into a frenzy, drowning out the strained and graphic sputters of a thoroughly emasculated Owl. The hinges were suffering, scarcely enduring.

Deciding that it would only be a burden to him in the coming skirmish, Vincent tossed the stolen Materia into a vibrant sprawl of evidence.

The others from above were flocking down the stairs, attracted by the carnage, illegal firearms nestled in their arms. They were squalling in disarray, their incomprehensible language bearing the same origin as Owl's. Vincent swiftly gave Cerberus its fill, snatching the triple barrels shut at the very moment the first wave of traffickers swarmed the room. He blew a man's pectoral muscle open with one blast, a viscous red spray licking up the stone archway behind him. The fine, coppery cloud caught in another man's eyes as he stumbled in recklessly, blinding him in searing needles of pain. A thick, silvery caliber skewered through his frontal lobe and scalped him in an unclean spume of brain fluid. The third was more cautious, filing out into the basement with a partner at his flank.

Vincent whirled onto his knee, his frayed mantle devouring the return fire. Their cover was a slender passage and no more, affording the men very little by way of tactical advantage. Numbers were nothing if they could only huddle in the threshold opening, two-by-two; wraithlike, Vincent - in the guise of his cloak - leapt from edge to edge of the slim corridor, deflecting stray shots and unloading lethal doses of his own. His ears pricked, detecting faintly in the background the wails of those who surrendered and broke rank, routing for their own safety for the streets outside. He plugged another with a fistful of bullets to the gut, sweeping around the panicked horde with an intangible, liquid grace. He re-emerged between two men, ducked down low; he latched his gilded claw firmly onto the hooded jacket of the man in front of him, and split through the spine of the gunman behind him in a bloody jet. The final obstacle rattled off a hasty clip into the pandemonium below, but Vincent dragged the thrashing meat shield around to absorb the fatal deluge. A final squeeze of the trigger ended the slaughter.

There were keys on some bodies, all cut to the same shape.  
All cut for access to the cages there in that sick underbelly, whenever they were tempted.

Vincent freed the prisoners, reflecting upon the abortive turn of the day's events. He wondered what a penitent man might have done in his position to lighten the burden of sentencing so many deaths, but there was a peculiar absence of guilt that afternoon. The girls flocked out into the main room upstairs, limping, their feet anaesthetised to any feeling that wasn't a man's hand. Hauling himself towards the stairs was Owl, his unblinking, bestial eyes palpitating with rage.

Vincent locked down the degenerate compound, neither Hawk nor Kestrel in sight.  
A squad of WRO - _World Regenesis Organization_ \- members were allegedly on their way, responding to his emergency beacon.

With the sole of his boot pressed down against the unconscious Owl's head - lost to blood loss - Vincent waited out their arrival.

* * *

It wasn't long before the response team flooded into the building, and the traumatised women were provided with blankets, clothing, food and water. A multitude of medical vehicles were lined up on the curb outside, each lost captive tended, bandaged, cleaned and consoled. Vincent walked through the scene, his impassive features belying the terrible swell of conflict that had begun to seep onerously into his conscience. The cool winds were refreshing against the suffocating heat he had just been exposed to, and his heart - one which beat soundly with living, human will - ached with concern for the tortured girls.

 _Don Santeo, indeed._

"Hey, dummy!" The twittering, all-too familiar yell of Yuffie Kisaragi stung at his ears, interrupting him. The young ninja hopped down from her vantage point atop a WRO-emblazoned ambulance, the landing light and effortless upon lean and slender legs. Strapped against the back of her sleeveless shirt, ornamented with the white Wutai rose, was a four-spoked shuriken. "Didn't I tell you _not_ to touch that Materia? Well? _Didn't_ I? Tell me I didn't, I _dare_ ya'!"

Vincent glanced down at her with gruelling disdain. Even with her motion sickness, he couldn't recall the last time Yuffie was quiet. She was loud - perhaps even more so than usual - even when she was hunched over the railings of an airship, feeble and nauseous. With his sights set on the mansion of this 'Don Santeo' character, the gunslinger strolled on ahead of the babbling little puppy from Wutai. A _rose_ , she claimed herself as: she was more like algae.

"Hey, I'm _talking_ here!" Yuffie barked, and with a refusal to go ignored, scampered up behind her morose companion.

"You certainly do seem to have a lot to say," Vincent agreed coldly. Her grasp on his cloak didn't help to ease his judgment of her, but then again Yuffie didn't seem to care about where she was in the strides of others. Her world revolved around herself, and nobody else. She was spoilt, immature and difficult.

"And what's _that_ supposed to mean?" Yuffie tugged harshly on his garment, the insult soaking her eyes with vibrant colour. "For your information, I was onto somethin' _huge_ with this! This was gonna be _my_ moment, Vincent, but _no_! You've gotta _waltz_ on in, all gruff and angsty, and take it for _yourself_!"

"So you knew," was all he observed from that tantrum.

"I...!" The ninja stammered, feeling the weight emptying from her argument. She rubbed the back of her head sheepishly. "Er..."

"You knew, and yet said you nothing of it," Vincent chastised. "For your role in gathering intelligence, you're rather poor at it."

"Are you calling me _stupid_ again?!" Yuffie stamped down on the loner's cloak tails, drawing it taut underfoot. "I had a plan, y'know! It was a real doozy, too!" She jabbed with her left fist twice, hooking up with her right, boxing shadows and dramatically mimicking the slashes of her arms. "First, I'd infiltrate! I'd slip in behind enemy lines, gain all of their plans while I posed as one of their most trusted acquaintances - and then, pow! _Hoo-hah!_ I'd blacklist 'em, literally! I'd take all their lists of transactions, all their hot-wire accounts - _hey_ , I'd get a job as their receptionist! Big, official places always want those. And _then_...!'

"...That's an atrocious plan." Vincent wrenched the crimson pool out from beneath Yuffie, the fabric torn from the motion. She grimaced at him, her small hands whitened from the knots of stress there, before she stooped down to lift up the rag. By the time she returned her gaze to him, Vincent was ten paces away.

"Wait up, ya' jerk!" Yuffie jogged up to Vincent, marching briskly beside him. "What's wrong with my plan, anyway?! You haven't even heard the best part!"

"That's because it doesn't _exist_." Vincent was in no mood for company, much less the implacable candour of Wutai's best and brightest. Time and time again, Yuffie had sought to mellow that constant emotional turtle-shell of his with tireless futility. He might once have commended her tenacity, but the pragmatic (she would have read _pessimistic_ ) side of him urged him to convince her that she he was not an amiable sort of person. He did not _hug_ , he did not _return calls_ , he did not _text_ , and he much preferred his hermetic lifestyle which, incidentally, did not involve succumbing to the sunny wiles of this nineteen-year-old nuisance.

Whichever plan she'd conceived of would have been a terrible idea. It wasn't that he doubted the young girl's beguiling array of skills, but it was more that he didn't easily entertain the image of her - young, curious and attractive - tangling herself up in those despicable affairs. It was as if she didn't understand the gravity of what he'd just underwent. She was completely foolish at times, so infernally isolated from reality that he often found himself thinking of her idiocy.

" _King_ of jerks!" Yuffie slugged an ineffectual punch against his upper arm. "So what's so important about _this_ way, anyway? What'd you find out?"

"Enough," was his only reply. His attention was upon the street signs of the Grimhaven District, which were rough slats of wood nailed together, or junk metal - ranging from crowbarred car doors to pilfered Meteorfall monument scraps - slung by chains around lampposts. Apparently, ShinRa hadn't financed this far from the bustling core of the city, but it was peculiar for Vincent to agree with their policies: expenses would only go to waste here in this desiccated ruin of society.

"Oh," Yuffie huffed, theatrical as ever. " _I_ get it! We're doing the _Vincent-sulks-and-says-one-word-to-push-Yuffie-away_ game, huh? Well, how's that worked out for you the past _ten thousand_ times you've tried it? Face it, Vinnie," she was far too proud of her inability to recognise when she wasn't wanted. Her smug aura said her following boast for her, but she expressed it out loud all the same. "You're _stuck_ with me for good, cowboy! Don't you holster on me - spill it!"

"Don Santeo is behind this." Yuffie was a damn menace, but she was gifted with the flexibility and resources that he had not been. If she was going to persist, then he might as well glean what information she had collected in her own investigation. With the crux of the issue dropped on her, he awaited her reply.

Vincent drew out his arm in front of Yuffie, fencing her away from the roadside. Two dilapidated motors roared past them in quick, careless succession, their engines screaming with age, bursting and belching out voluminous swells of thick smog. Yuffie took a skittish step back, squeaking in surprise. The struggling gears revved up with the staggered consistency of heart attacks, before they faded away around the natural bend of the street.

Racers: mad, penniless addicts craving an adrenaline rush.  
Their numbers had increased in Edge as of late - along with corpses. _  
_

 _Not that anyone cared._

"Oh, _him_?" Yuffie's lip curled as they set out across the road, her eyes darting around for signs of any more vehicles. "Ew, I should'a _known_! I dug up some dirt on that creep before, but all I got on him was that he's a huge, ugly perv, _just_ like his old man!"

"He has relatives?" _Good_. One could never have enough leads.

" _Had_." It was incredible how she managed to build up and tear down his hopes in a single conversation. "He's Don Corneo's kid, so naturally the mom wasn't exactly a princess - unlike _me!_ " She elbowed Vincent suggestively, but her stomach quailed from the memories of the Slum Don's ultimate visit to her homeland. He'd swallowed his just desserts under the shoe of a Turk, his body an unidentifiable, wet mural across the pitted rock feet of the Wutai cliffs. Yuffie skipped up over the curb, a hand nestled against her belly. "Ugh, _gross_... I don't even wanna _think_ about what that poor chick went through!"

Vincent didn't have to think about it. He was fully aware of the visceral truths behind the human market, as heart-rending as they were. He would never let himself forget the emaciated slabs of women, or that horrendous, sweaty miasma inside those livestock cages. But this sinister hydra had many heads, and he had only lopped off one of them. No doubt, before their task was through Yuffie would no longer have to only think about the reality behind it all either.

The remainder of their journey was spent navigating the convoluted backstreets, in the company of Yuffie's half-conscious drivel. Weaving around the next curve, Vincent pressed off with a spontaneous, sprightly leap. Soundless, he vaulted up onto the hollow metal pipe bearing the signpost for Don Santeo's mansion, a fluttering ghost amid the languid blink of evening, before lunging up high above the apartment block in front of him. Left in his inexplicable tracks was a bemused Yuffie, who scowled before scaling the building with similarly feline elegance. She scrambled up onto the rooftop after him, finding Vincent knelt at its opposite edge. Naturally curious, the ninja crept over to his side and felt inclined to adopt the same perch as her partner.

"Hey Vinnie," she whispered. "What's with the comic book moves all of a sudden?"

Vincent's dark, sanguine gaze roamed over a decrepit bastion composed entirely of old vehicles. Together they formed an enormous, rusted palisade three engines high, square in formation - they were empty, graffiti-riddled, and either stolen or towered there from scrap; Vincent presumed the former. The lowest stratum was a set of strategically aligned lorries, the rears of which most likely pitched ramps for the second level. At either corner of the makeshift walls were folded-up steel slopes - and given the robust, hefty size of the cars' tyres, they had been remodelled to accommodate precarious falls and shifting terrain. It was little wonder that the Don had a slippery, invisible sort of reputation - his so-called 'mansion' was a mobile fortress, prepared to evacuate at a moment's notice.

"We're in Don Santeo's territory."


	3. III: The Web

**III**

* * *

The Don's hideout was a renovated limb of one of Edge's metalworks facilities, now inoperative and abandoned. A gaudy nerve-centre of lights was suspended from the vehicular walls like a spider's web into the central complex, which was a formerly bland, charcoal building in the shape of a protracted sandglass. Santeo's men patrolled the courtyard with the teeming presence of a roach infestation, but Vincent spied that their movements were tedious and maundering, bought by Gil or blackmail, their loyalties - at a push - neutral, if not their own. Long, sawn-edged poles erected up from the dry soil, blanketed by sheets of tarpaulin and other scavenged materials that constructed threadbare tents for the mercenaries to bicker, smoke, drink and gamble through their off-shifts.

Vincent scoped out their patterns; whether they were conscious or not, it was a relatively known fact that humans were creatures of habit and routine - a matter of patient observation gradually exposed their preferred tracks. It was a task made more difficult by the low peppering of his companion's questions.

"So, what's the plan?" Yuffie unclipped a pair of binoculars from her belt, peering through a bevelled blue night-vision lens. The weeds of Don Santeo's influence, it seemed, ran deeper and more ubiquitous throughout the city than she had initially conceived: one guard, weary with such an uneventful duty, rested his assault rifle against the edge of a flaming barrel, toasting his hands above it. There were no threats to the Don. No _recognised_ threats - yet.

Vincent's first thought was for her to return home, to lock herself in her apartment and remain safe from a potential trail back to him. However, she was useful. She was skilled. As juvenile as her constant tweeting was, Vincent had chalked it up to her youth; moreover, any attempts of his to dissuade her from joining him in this investigation would only lead to either her refusal, or her own individual pursuit. He both foresaw and accepted this far before her query surfaced.

"First, we infiltrate." It was an echo of her plan that he had disparaged earlier, which wasn't lost on the teenaged ninja. She kinked her brow in a complacent grin, earning her a scathing glare from her partner. _'Not in your asinine way',_ his eyes spoke. "Undetected," Vincent elaborated - _and_ _emphasised_ \- aloud.

"The courtyard's way too open though," Yuffie mused. The only entrance was flanked by two heavily-armed hoodlums, so the trademark _Barret-Wallace-approach_ was beyond consideration. "We're not gonna get _anywhere_ without a distraction, or somethin'! Man, he's holed up good..."

"A good strategist turns an enemy's greatest strength into their greatest weakness," Vincent philosophised to the tired and thankless purse of Yuffie's lips. "Step back and reevaluate what he's hiding behind - the _nature_ of these obstructions. Ask yourself, 'what composes this wall'?"

"Er, cars?" She rolled with the punches, even if he creeping into brain-aching melodrama.

"And what is their primary purpose?"

"They mo-... Oh," Yuffie grunted. "Hey, I knew _that_...!"

"Precisely." Vincent studied the uppermost level first, his pointed, golden fingers gnarling and crooking eagerly. "They _move_."

* * *

Evening baptised the moody sky above Edge, runnels of a dreary and wretched dusk ebbed out across it. Vincent and Yuffie moved in towards the western and eastern fringes of the compound respectively, slipping stealthily beneath the lazy and perfunctory watch of the guards. They were streamlined, symmetrical, tucked low to the ground, evading the rays of waking street lamps. Yuffie sprinted up the side of a lorry's trailer with a muted feline athleticism; Vincent drifted upon another opposite it with the eerie, supernatural air of an incurred spectre. They were stark contrasts, like flesh and shadow; incongruous yet as one.

Vincent hung onto the gaping window of a third-row car, which was positioned on a backward slant. With his left arm, sleeved in shining plate, he carefully prised the door open with little stress on its decaying hinges. Yuffie, meanwhile, found very little fortune. She sidled across the vehicular graveyard, each window frustratingly intact as she shimmied past the first available corner, cursing under her breath. Her phone vibrated once in her pocket: the signal.

 _'Damn it,'_ she panicked, searching hurriedly for the mercy of an unlocked door. _'C'mon, cars...!'_

Another shiver from her phone.

 _'All right, already, Vinnie!_ ' Yuffie's worried, hazel eyes roamed across the chassis dam. _'Give a girl a break...'_

Yuffie swept around onto the topmost layer, at the far side diagonally opposite to Vincent's. Her fingers curled discretely underneath furthest's handle, and after testing it, found a deep spell of excitement overcoming her as it came ajar. She sighed shakily, sagging up against its body in relief, before slinking inside its front compartment. Her thief's utensils were vital - she'd been taught how to gut and dismember ShinRa machinery by her family since infancy, and simple, old cars like these weren't too far from what she could remember. After a tense few moments, Vincent's phone reverberated within the folds of his cloak.

Both cars shuddered to life simultaneously, attracting a surge of attention from the Don's mercenaries.  
The handbrakes loosened, and the wheels stirred.

The tumultuous crowd of courtyard thugs levelled their weapons, scanning their surroundings with fruitless and untrained endeavour. Laser-guided sights carved an abstract, psychedelic light show against the dusk, each one aimless, a toothless intimidation. Against the world's saviours, they stood little hope.

From either side, the lofty cars were drawn by gravity closer towards the edge. Slowly, inexorably, their fates loomed. There was a shift, unsteady mechanical groans, either vehicles' tyres whirring and slicing at the air briefly, before a disastrous collision of heavy metal frames against cracked concrete. The hoods were dented; Vincent's tampered car stood up like a defaced pillar, before it collapsed onto its roof. They simmered, rungs of heat seeping out through the limp trunks. However it was disarray they needed, not destruction, and they had the former in droves. The mercenaries formed anxious throngs around the crash sites, their inexperience manifesting in wary, undisciplined swings of their rifles, and twitchy shouts of obscenity and false arrogance into the oncoming night.

Its security diffused and uncoordinated, it had never been easier for Vincent and Yuffie to hurry in through the front doors.

* * *

A single, spherical object - their agreed precaution - rolled into the compound foyer. Its head burst away in a sudden flourish of gas, harmless yet obscure. It was a voluminous curtain of smoke that grew thick and pregnant in a handful of seconds, accompanying the clatter of boots storming into its murky clutches.

Once through the entrance, Vincent instinctively drew Cerberus.

"Hey, woah there!" Yuffie palmed the three-headed gun down, heart aflutter. "We're _in_ , already!"

"There aren't any cameras," the gunslinger remarked, tone deadened. Further disconcerting was how utterly devoid of sound the refurbished facility was, as the cacophony from outside was no longer audible. It was barren inside, without any prominent footfalls or discernible activity from those who dwelt there. "He's either more of a halfwit than I anticipated, or he must truly abhor leaving evidence behind."

"Maybe he doesn't _need_ evidence," piped up Yuffie.

The doors behind them swung open again, and in scurried what must have been the poor man singled out as the Don's messenger. He was three feet inside the compound before he managed to stumble to a stop, lifting his rifle in futile threat. A cascade of bullets from Cerberus's maw sank into the gun shaft, launching the mangled weapon from the scout's hands. Yuffie bowled her shuriken towards him, its trajectory low as it gyrated through the tendons above his knee. He flattened onto the floor in a pained cry through his red neck-scarf, a frown burrowed across blood-soiled thighs. The ninja caught her faithful wheel upon its return, and ran over to the fallen guard's side. She straddled his back, and threaded her lithe arm beneath his chin, constricting tightly against his windpipe.

"Okay, big fella'," Yuffie exhaled, wrestling his upper body into twisted submission. "Where's the boss at?!"

" _Ugh,_ " the mercenary choked out, "like hell I'm... _urk_ , gonna tell you _shit_ , little girl..!"

"You're gonna have a _little girl_ snap your _neck_ in a second!" Yuffie strained, her slim muscles tautening against his throat. "Like you've got the pride to keep this up, anyway - c'mon," she wrenched him up again, forcing out a gag. Vincent watched on, aloof. "Cough it up!"

"What nerve, you bitch... Just wait 'til Don Santeo gets his hands on- _agh_ ," teeth grit, the man spat a defiant wad across the tiles.

"She's right." Vincent introduced another angle of interrogation: some sort of concord. The men outside had been chaotic and unprepared. They reacted to the ambush with all the scattered wits of street-born ruffians, lacking the intuition and rigidity of soldiers. They were also lacking their fidelity and sense of common purpose, roped together as an inane band of self-serving cowards. He presented the man with a handful of Gil, their lavish lustre amounting to thousands in worth, and Yuffie's struggle subsided significantly. "I hope this will be sufficient enough for you to reconsider. Choose now: wealth, or a broken neck."

All the conflict drained in the man's eyes.  
Once hostile, they now bore the softer colours of greed.

"Looks like I got death comin' either way then," the freelancer sneered grimly. "All right... Get your damn attack dog off me," he budged against her.

Vincent and Yuffie exchanged glances, before the latter reluctantly shifted herself off him. The mercenary slumped back down onto his hands, rasping coarsely into the shade thrown by his bowed head. Regathering himself, he lunged out at the heap of coins. They were brought back, just out of reach.

"You piece of..."

" _After_ you've fulfilled your dues," Vincent scolded. The man buckled from the excruciating gashes across his thighs, his legs wobbling as if gelatinous. Mid-collapse, the red-cloaked gunman hoisted him ungainly by a fistful of his collar and marched him forward through the hallway. With feet dangling around and only occasionally making ground like an unstrung marionette, the mercenary squirmed awkwardly. Vincent was having none of his disobedience, and jerked and forced the body in his unyielding grasp deeper into the compound. Killing off his empathy for this man was a reminder of his service in Shinra, long ago; he had taken valuable hostages for reconnaissance missions then, too. He had deafened his ears to their terrified and broken moans then, just as he did now.

It didn't make him feel any better as a person.  
It didn't lighten his shoulders. It didn't alleviate his sins.

People had still perished, and worlds had still been jeopardised. All while he rotted, blighted, numb and forgotten.  
Rightfully so.

The three manoeuvred through the evacuated plant, its haunted and labyrinthine bowels a contradiction against the vibrant palace of vulgarity that the Don's father had enjoyed. It had none of the boldness, the licentious, sultry flair of a king in his own indulgent paradise. As they passed by blacked-out door windows, each welded shut, chills tickling down Yuffie's spine. She had lost her peppy spirit, and prowled through the corridors like a cautious young animal.

They approached a garish pair of doors, which were hemmed in gold baubles. The handles were large and sloped around like kissing swans when drawn closed together, the pink, mottled-glass cast between them forming the shape of a heart. The same fuchsia tone decorated the remainder of the threshold.

"Through here," croaked the man. Vincent released his hold over him, driving a lobstered fist into the back of his skull. The crippling torrent of agony for the man subsided as his world dissolved into a sudden and unexpected sleep. Yuffie stalked over the heaped mess, lip crinkled in disgust.

"Are you ready?" Vincent asked her.

"No kidding! Wutai's _always_ ready!" Yuffie boasted, the cheer flowing back to her. "What about you, old man?"

She didn't warrant a reply. Vincent shouldered through the doors instead, paving the way into an enormous casting chamber. Hooked chains and loose crane wires hung from the steepled ceiling like an inverse forest, clashing with the unnervingly magical scenery below. The floor, once blackened with soot, was a glaring disparity from the rest of the plant through which the partners had just traversed. It was a polished white marble, dressed with a fine burgundy carpet. Atop what was once a bridge of defunct machinery was a furred throne, which oversaw a pyramid of stairs protected by an active moat of moulding cavities.

Slumped in the throne was Don Santeo himself. He was a revolting, obese maggot of a man who pooled out over the arms of the chair, his bulbous gut appearing to melt over his stumpy legs, except his thick, right clubbed foot. His jaws were still working slowly over the half-digested morsels lodged between his teeth, and slobber lapped down the valleys of his four chins. An extravagant, rounded globe of brilliant armour hugged around his plump figure, the pieces creaking and askew; fit to burst. What nightmarish recollections Yuffie had of Don Corneo were almost regal in comparison to his putrid offspring. Most bizarrely, a string of slender, beautiful young women milled around him in skimpy, titillating orbit; some carried sterling, steaming platters of meat, while others, stripped of virtue with sheer insults to the name of garments, strutted around the court in slit-cup brassieres and translucent skirts. Yuffie felt her insides shrivel up.

"I've already had my presents today," the Don slurred, his fat tongue slapping around stray flecks of food. "But let's get a good look at you." He ogled the Wutai Rose with squinted, piggish eyes, a trait that he unfortunately shared with his late father. "Very nice, _heh_... Yes, very, very nice. You're a nice, perky one, yes..."

Vincent drew Cerberus on the swine, betraying his defensive instinct.

" _Enough,"_ he growled.

Don Santeo bleated out a vile, glottal laugh. His sticky fingers massaged against the arms of his throne, sloughing off excess grease and sweat. In answer to the death sentence brought before him, the Don of Grimhaven hauled himself to his feet. It was a gradual, almost impossible feat as he peeled himself to full height, a stunted and unpalatable mound of morbid weight. His armour smiled with him, beckoning the shot with a spectrum of incandescent, spherical lights.

"I suppose we've all had it a little bit too _easy_ today," Santeo leered towards Yuffie, insatiable. "Yourselves included, Mr. Valentine and Miss. Kisaragi."


	4. IV: Sins of the Father

**IV**

* * *

Vincent glowered towards the Don.  
Seething rubies loomed beneath a bedraggled, black mane.

"Oh, don't you want to _talk_ , Vincent?" The abominable man groped onto the nearest slave-girl, who stumbled back against her master with a whimper. His arm roped around her delicate neck like an engorged mass of butcher's meat. Clammy and swollen, it almost consumed her into its many folds. "Thirty years nailed away underground, left for the rats and the worms and the diseases to find you... If _I_ were you, I'd have sung away the rust in my throat long ago!"

"If you _were_ him," Yuffie shouted through the tension, "he'd be moving around on a _forklift,_ ya' ugly old piece'a _nasty_!"

Vincent drew out his arm before the brash teenager, as if to prevent her from further damage; attempting to censor her was ridiculous. There was an unsettling, creeping torsion in his stomach. He wondered how, without any prior introductions, Don Santeo had managed to recognise the pair of them by name and on sight. What further bothered Vincent was the knowledge of his past, a murky and otherwise cryptic remnant of a life from which he now sought redemption.

"Don't worry," the Don's lips carved into a defiling grin, drooling. "Nothing's a secret here, _urk_..." Hot, sickly air bubbled out against the nape of the slave-girl's neck from his belch, followed by a half-hearted, even sarcastic apology from her owner. He wiped down slender Becky's strawberry-blonde tousles of hair with the fondness of a child intoxicated by their doll, brushing the glossy twirls with obsession. The girl winced with displeasure. "Ahh... ask me anything you want!"

"You don't deny your part in this slavery market, then?" Vincent never retreated Cerberus away from him. Not once.

" _Deny_ it?" Don Santeo scoffed, frothing at the mouth with ill humour. "I _started_ it! I'm _proud_ of it! These girls don't know what a good life is. Never have, never will! What do poor girls do? Whine and moan, _mm_... yes, then squeeze out a few babies if they can, and then _die_. Ain't fair to give 'em _hope_ now, is it? They can have my scraps when I'm done with them, have water when they deserve it," he mumbled wantonly into the sweet-scented slope of young Becky's clavicle, sniffing at her pale skin. "Mm... And they can be grateful I'm still _extremely_ fertile, _heh-heh_... I'm not being any crueller than life would be to 'em otherwise..."

"Hey, you got _wax_ in your ears, _bacon-guts_?" Yuffie snarled out, temper rearing towards the distressed young harlot. Whether she felt sorry for her, or she simply had no more patience for people dictating others' lives. 'Sympathetic' wasn't one of Vincent's initial thoughts regarding Yuffie, but now that he'd witnessed it first-hand she was beginning to rise in his estimations - and bar her more _unrefined_ edges, he found himself in agreement with her. "Can you even _hear_ yourself?! Who gave _you_ the power to snatch these poor chicks off the streets and decide to play God with their lives, huh?! Throw me a bone, slime-bag!"

"Actually, my sweet... _you_ did," the Don gloated.

"Wait," Yuffie stalled, a cold, syrupy slither oozing down her spine. " _Huh_...?"

"Thanks to _you_ , and those _Turks_ in Shinra," Santeo's voice lifted dramatically, reverberating throughout the factory's tomb. "I got _pig-stinkin' rich_ off'a big, fat wad of life insurance left behind in _my_ honour! Hah- _hah_...! I liquidated it all, every single asset left... and built _down_ , not up! All my fingers are underground... Under the circuits that switch on whore-house lights, under the locks of every gang's weapons cache, in _every_ pie in _every_ oven!" His pinched eyes, like slits of mire and compost, roamed across the slender, petite outline of Yuffie's body. "To think, it's all because of your, mm, _delicious_ little figure..."

"That doesn't explain how you know who we are." Vincent was tempted to try and bury a bullet inside the Don's skull, but casualties - innocent instruments of his so-called _luxuries_ \- would be impossible to avoid. That girl was just a meat-shield for Santeo to cower behind and flaunt himself from. It irked him.

"Illustrious members of the World Regenesis Organization," the Don listed off facetiously. "The saviours of the world, swatting down great monsters in the centre of the city... The princess of _Wutai_ , for Gaia's sake! You don't hide yourselves very well anymore, weighed down with your medals and your polished records, believe me that." Vincent supposed it was the first sliver of sense that had babbled its way out of that accursed mouth. "And, well... Squalor is my life! I've even devoted a _court_ here to it, so what happens when you indulge in it? You dig up other bits of dirt, here and there... how often ruins _talk_ , Vincent! You'd be surprised how often the dead have something to say! Now, you might follow my earlier question... I wonder what the ruins of your _body_ sing about, Vincent!"

"You'll forgive me," the gunslinger sniped, as dry as the Midgar wastes. "I didn't know you were a poet, as well as a degenerate."  
Yuffie snickered beside him, but it was vindictive and petty, a score lifted out of pure resentment towards the man.

" _Revenge_ , maybe?" The Don mulled aloud, before he wobbled his cheeks in decision. "No, not revenge... Well, perhaps after today - _heh, heh_... But not now."

Vincent's gaze narrowed.

"Well, they certainly don't sing of any _virtues_ , Mr. Valentine..." the larger man's teeth ground together, scrutinising - _and relishing in_ \- the visible signs of unease which splintered along the frigid textures of his assailant's appearance. "So, what then? What lurks within Vincent Valentine's rickety old corpse..."

Don Corneo had been an odious man at the best of times, but his son was beyond any semblance of humanity to offend. He was a rancid, covetous pestilence of creation, joining those incorrigible few who had managed to burrow under Vincent's skin. He sat within his heart like a gluttonous tapeworm, gorged on vice.

"My, how eager your bones are to _scream_ of it," taunted Santeo. "Our shameful secrets, as worldly _men_..."

"Hey Vinnie," Yuffie chirped up, breaking apart the spellbound connection that had left her partner oddly paralysed. Only by leading his sight over to her did Vincent gather enough resolve to understand how afraid she was. Despite all of her audacity, Yuffie was trembling like a puppy before a savage hound, remaining staunchly defensive over him - as he had been over her in their years of cooperation. "I've heard enough of this crap! How about you, huh?"

"He never will," the Don, a malignant tumour given flesh, was all-too pleased with himself. "Not of you, anyway. _Lust_ will do that, my sweet princess..."

Cerberus crackled without warning, its infernal bellow flinching Don Santeo behind his human protection. Yuffie jolted away, her eardrums wailing with tinnitus. It raged and coursed through her head, emanating out across reeling, squealing nerves, her vision the only source among the momentary bedlam. She cupped her ears, looking with consternation towards the effigy of living stone that Vincent had transmuted into. He stared towards the unharmed Don, who was catching his breath, moulting sluices of sweat down the banks of his cheeks, with such tranquil, yet tangible fury it instilled a venom of worry into Yuffie's thoughts.

Behind Don Santeo was a smoking lattice in the wall, riddled with bullets.

"He's a liar," Vincent explained, returned to a controlled monotone. "He perverts the truth, as much as he does others."

"Well, _duh_! He freaks me out, too!" Yuffie's volume surged over the gunshot, evening out in a fluctuation that was almost akin to surfacing in water. "Ugh, man... You didn't have to go and bust open a wall to say it! You could've just whispered it - if I couldn't hear my voice, I think I'd just give up and die!" She readied her shuriken, fingers coiled warily around the narrow hilt of one of its four protrusive shafts. "All right, what's the plan to take this guy out?"

More slave-girls gravitated towards the Don, enraptured by the scintillating yellow and indigo orbs embedded into his armour. They attracted around him, lurid and scant, satellites garbed in exotic shawls and pleasurable sways. Had they any independence, a sane woman might have been repulsed by the natural redolence of expired meat juices and unsavoury bodily odours that engulfed his gargantuan physique. These mindless, skinny endowments to his inner circle girdled around him with oblivious devotion, crawling over him as though he were a radiant prince, their hands exploring, snaking hungrily over him.

" _Vinnie_ ," Yuffie whispered sharply, still faithful to their success. "Hey, Vincent! Tick-tock, beastie boy! What are we gonna do?"

"It was a good try," Don Santeo called out, in full appreciation of their vanity. With a firm, crass swipe of his palm against the unclothed rump of one of his enchanted dolls, he added, "you almost caught me with my pants down, too. Very good! Very, very good. But even if your friends at the WRO get here on time, I've got enough spare girls below deck to last me a whole damn siege. Besides, I don't care about wastin' any of 'em to make a statement..."

Yuffie leaned forward, trying to capture her partner's attention. Lost and bewildered, her voice became weaker, searching, lost. "Hey, jerk, I'm talkin' to you!"  
There was no response.

"Yo', Vincent!"

There was nothing.

"...Vincent?"

 _Was this it?_ Yuffie fretted internally, uncertain she could believe it yet. How many months had it been since last she and Vincent had encountered an opponent who had brought them to the very limits of their souls, who had drowned their hearts in lamentation and defeat? In recent memory, she couldn't recall any. It was a wake-up call - and a punishing one, at that. Perhaps, she speculated, they had acquired a subconscious arrogance in their executions?

Perhaps this had been one long mission in itself.  
Perhaps the ease of that day had simply been a sick feint in the Don's schemes.

 _'Vincent, c'mon,'_ Yuffie encouraged, begging him with wide, agitated eyes. _'You gotta win, Vincent - hey, we always do...!'_

"I'm parched," Don Santeo snorted. "And since we're all out of good drink here... _Heh_ , I might pay a visit to Seventh Heaven, what do you think? Might get one of these girls to dress up like that gorgeous barmaid in there tonight - or, _mm_... I might see if I can't bring that shapely little vixen back myself..."

Vincent withdrew Cerberus, defeated.  
The Don knew. He knew everyone.

He wasn't a feral, winged absurdity, nor a tremendous scaled behemoth. There was no waging battle against him. There was no conventional conflict of right versus evil; there were no rules with him, only the dingy, underhanded tunnels of this new underground empire. If they stood any chance of decapitating it, then they would have to fall back and reevaluate their approach. No longer were there violent, preternatural would-be Gods, or oppressive worldwide authorities - this was a lawless and unpredictable battleground, one where neither of their weapons nor wits would prevail them. Vincent, in spiteful acknowledgement of this, cast his cloak up between Yuffie and Don Santeo like a histrionic curtain-fall, much to the ninja's overwrought temperament.

"We're leaving," Vincent ordered, spurring them towards the doors.

"Vinnie, no!" Yuffie struggled back, driving her heels obstinately into the floor. "No, I wanna _fight_ him - I wanna win, lemme _win_!" She was scrapping against his unfeeling arm, beating upon it, crying out in helpless, damned frustration. She refused to lose, denying and fighting and thrashing until the breath burned in her throat and the tears were born hot and immaculate from her crestfallen eyes. "Let me go - Vincent! _Vincent_! Let me kill him - I'll _kill_ him, I _swear_ , I'll...!"

"Don't worry about finding your way back here again, Miss. Kisaragi," were the final words that dawned upon Yuffie as she was roughly escorted from the chamber, "I'll be with you later, where you laugh, where you rest and sleep and dream... ah, shall I break the _woman_ into you, my sweet _princess_?"

* * *

"Let me... _go_!"

Yuffie pried herself furiously out of Vincent's guarded embrace, staggering tearfully into her apartment.  
She was shaken; Vincent wasn't the only one beneath whose skin that _fiend_ had occupied.

"Yuffie," he began.

" _No!_ " She screamed, cracked between heartache and indignation. A storm of anger woke from her quick strides into the living room, and her knuckles blanched against the spine of a chair. A wild, hurtful emotion tempted her to swing it into the wall; another encouraged her to swing it at _him_. She listened to neither. "No, you don't _get_ to make excuses for what you did! We _had_ him! We had him _right_ there in front of us, _right there!_ And... and we could've _done it_ _,_ Vincent!"

He consoled her with silence.

"W-we could've..." Bile turned to regret; regret dissolved into sorrow. Her losses caught in her throat, her nails sculpting into the wooden curve of the chair. "We- we could've saved those girls; I... I could've saved... oh _Gaia,_ Vincent, those girls..."

Vincent moved closer to her, unfurling his arm. She buried herself into the sinew of his side, her arms thrown fearfully around his torso. Her small body heaved with sobs, wracked with terror and contrition both too much for her to cope with. He was her rock. As frightful, rueful tides lashed and struck against her throughout that long and terrible night, he was her rock. She clung to him as though those very real waters were preparing to swallow her, to claim her, to change her into something that she resisted with the waning residues of her mortal stamina. Sorrow, at last, gave way to exhaustion. Yuffie looked up at Vincent with a deep, wounded longing; a longing for the companionship, trust and - dare she confess it, _love_ \- that she'd denied herself since infancy. She needed him.

"Don't leave me alone tonight, okay?" Yuffie pleaded with the fragility of having borne far too much, far too young.

Yuffie crawled into her bed fully clothed, being equal measures too conscious to undress in front of a man, and too nervous to uncover herself. Those greedy, deviant eyes still crawled over her gooseflesh; she could still _feel_ him there, lustful and dissolute, a shade much more criminal than his father had ever been. She rehearsed every line, every thought and expression inside that facility, and fidgeted under her sheets, willing - _wishing_ \- for time to unwind and for her to hew through the whole pack of those girls if it meant she could lodge the point of her shuriken through that monster's eye; she didn't mean that. Those girls haunted her memory just as much as he did. To become one - to lose all instinct, and desire, and soul - cored out her worries. Yuffie hugged onto a pillow as if it would render her invisible, as if it granted her strength: as if it was her rock. As if it was the sturdy, imperturbable, and protective spirit of Vincent Valentine.

When her dreams finally came, they weren't of torment, or innocence lost.

Her guardian angel snapped his phone down on the Seventh Heaven, and in quiet, dreadful revivification of guilt, Vincent didn't sleep. He stayed at her beside, cluttered with unhooked utility belts and supplies, leant against by her shuriken, an unkempt and forbidden warmth within; he loomed beside the window, ever-vigilant, ever-selfless. Given appropriate judgment, he would one day perhaps forget the rancid Don of Grimhaven District. He would forget and forgive all the demons who marred this earth, even those who would deprive him of those he desired most - but never find it for himself.


	5. V: A Façade in Steam

**V**

* * *

Yuffie awoke, startled by the din of steel clattered upon wood.

She jolted up, still cuddled against her drool-dappled pillow. Dishevelled, Yuffie's short hair sat upon her like a bird's nest, ends split and static, and her eyes were sunken and groggy from the toils of the previous night. The room gained a dreamlike quality as the sunrise hailed motes of amber through the blinds. It was a bright yet bleached-out tone, strangely at odds with the steady pace of leftover rainfall outside.

Her bedroom was, as usual, a disgrace. Sheets were sown around her feet, half-draped over the mattress. Her personal effects were either buried beneath the mess, or were dispersed out over the laminate floor. The noise that had roused her had come from her shuriken, kicked over by a naked foot that now palpitated with a fierce, blushing spasm. The pained moan gathered deep in Yuffie's throat, and crept out more like a vexed yawn, protracted and already beaten.

The ninja curled back up around her pillow, holding urgently onto sleep.  
That was, until those harrowing events quickly swarmed back to her.

"Nuh-uh," twitchily, irritated, she swung herself back up as if she'd been set alight. "Nope. _Nope!_ "

She patted around herself for signs of intrusion, a habit that no matter how utterly trivial - and some might argue _pointless_ \- she had ingrained into herself since childhood. She chewed on her nails when she racked her brains hard, too. Some things were just incurable. They didn't render her any less of an angel, she'd always swat back at Vincent defensively. Little foibles like those were merely acts of kindness: she'd always said she was giving the other women of the world a chance, and whatever sardonic quip that the gunslinger had about Yuffie and _adulthood_ was met by any object within her range sent flying towards him.

"Vincent!" she whinged loudly, " _Vincent_!"

The crunching of lobstered boots heeded her cry. Although he hadn't slept, there were no traces of insomnia across Vincent's insipid countenance. He stepped in with the normality of a ghoul, his alien and altogether eccentric image dissonant against the backdrop of a typical city apartment. He seemed no different, no more and no less rested or healed from those dire hours in yesterday's death. There was always a constancy to Vincent, although Yuffie didn't know if she should be comforted by it, or seek to normalise him a little; reintegrate him into society, like an abstract, wayward pet. A pet with sixty years of lamentation behind it.

"You look awful," came Vincent's candid - and unwarranted - review of her appearance.

" _Excuse_ me?!" Yuffie hurled her pillow towards him, burnt up. It sailed into his hands, plush and ineffectual. He stood there without bemusement, or contention, or trouble. He was as stoic as the grave. "I know I must've just _dozed off_ again real quick, 'cause I just had this _wild_ dream that some raggedy-ass _jerk_ called me awful-lookin'! _Me!_ I'm not just cute; I'm the _queen_ of cute! So you walk back in and shoot a second take, or I'll _scream_!"

"I spoke to Tifa last night." Vincent disregarded her, but Yuffie emitted a sharp, stifling squeak in warning. "She's all-" Again he began to talk, but the ninja only repeated her off-putting and troublesome noise. While she was difficult, Vincent was in part relieved that she'd calmed down since her trauma. Yuffie fixed him with warning eyes, the severe sort that only scathed husbands find at the end of a lie - in Wutai, apparently, it was a technique taught prematurely to women.

When their stand-off reached the pinnacle of its tension, Yuffie's phone spasmed against the bedside. Swiping it up into her hand, she gave the caller a cursory once-over and cupped the device to her ear. All confrontation between them warmed into an amicable, breezy smile that Vincent perceived to be paper-thin.

"Hey, Reeve!" she held the speaker against her collarbone, declaring pointlessly, "it's _Reeve_!"  
Vincent exhaled from the superfluity, hanging on the former head of Urban Development's reply.

"Good morning Yuffie," came the crackled voice from the receiver. "Glad you're up so early! Anyway, I thought you should know that we managed to bleed some information out of the guy that Vincent left behind for us. He was _very_ talkative. Then again, I think _I_ would be if I had uh... well, the _surgery_ that he had."

"Surgery- _what_?" That scowl of hers rematerialised again.

"Ask Vincent about it," Reeve brushed it off. Speaking about that brought him a certain _southern_ malaise. "Anyway, the important part is that he's alive. And my, is he a squealer! Told us about this, uh... _Don Santeo_ character and his human trafficking rings. It's ugly. I don't know if Vincent went out on that lead too, so would you mind passing that onto him next time he decides to drop into our lives? I might've misplaced his number, as... _rare_ as it is to come by."

"I've got a funny feeling he already knows," Yuffie remarked knowingly.

"You're right there," Reeve snorted in cheer. "Well, we're gonna make some headway into our investigations today, but I just wanted to ask you to stay away from that guy... the Don, I mean."

"Why? What's up?" Yuffie's puzzled, albeit sheepish expression flicked over to Vincent's well-maintained composure.  
 _One damn job, and it was already scuppered._

"He's got a _lot_ of influence over people," the WRO founder elaborated. "Which is mainly why we're keeping _out_ of Grimhaven for now. Armed men wandering around, asking questions... Ah, it doesn't look great for us. If we go in there with an army, we could incite a civil war - or a massacre. Win or lose, we'd walk out of the whole thing as oppressors, or butchers, and either way it'd undo everything we've done. You've not made contact with him at all, have you?"

 _Would've been nice to have known that twelve hours ago_ , the snide Yuffie thought. "Nope! Want me to follow up on anything, chief?"

"Sure do, skipper," Reeve bounced back. "And you're gonna enjoy it, I think. We know that they're running this gig with Materia. To be more specific, we found Manipulate Materia in that building's basement. Now, due to a huge and _overly_ - _complicated_ debate over its ethics, Manipulate Materia isn't sourced legally anymore. It's not sold in stores, or produced by any known - or I suppose _certified -_ suppliers."

"Mm- _hmm_ ," Yuffie clambered onto her knees, visibly stimulated by the talk of Materia. "So you want me to find out where it's coming from, huh?"

"What can I say? You've got a good nose for Materia," Reeve knew how to play Yuffie. "The _best_ , some might say!"

"Well, _I'm_ the best and _I_ say I do!" the ninja stood up shakily, hopping off her bed in rejuvenated and buoyant spirits. "All right, Reeve, you're on! See ya'!"

"Best of luck to you, Yuffie," he said in farewell, "and keep out of too much trouble!"

Vincent watched her hurriedly folding her chosen clothes into a bundle and shamble into the bathroom, discarding her phone onto the remains of what had once been scrupulously-tidied sheets. He mulled over how blessed conversation with the ignorant was: Yuffie could raise those juvenile walls of hers again, and pretend that the horrors she'd experienced had never borne their execrable fruit. She could continue with her life with an artificial bravery, like a child having been comforted by their parents that there was no evil lurking within their wardrobes. It was a temporary high, a tender and transparent morale, and Vincent had little faith in its breadth of life. Sooner or later, that toiling, desperate mirage of mental subsistence was going to collapse in on her.

Then again, where had his callous pragmatism led him?  
Perhaps she truly had weathered her emotions well.  
Perhaps he simply underestimated how quickly she'd matured to the world.

Vincent wouldn't appreciate just how correct his assessment was. Not today.

The pattered flow of shower-water submerged the first few, furtive cracks of that façade. Yuffie choked herself back out of her emotional recession, breathing out with a heavy heart through the plumes of steam. She couldn't look down. It was a vertigo of memory; every sliver of her naked self salted her fresh, keening wounds. She scrubbed at herself, unable to scour away his eyes. She wanted him dead. She wanted to suffocate him with her own hands. Screaming out, she throttled tightly against the scalding pipes until her palms were prickled and rosy with heat. Yuffie always emerged victorious, so why not _then_?

Refreshing herself in the mirror, she revisited Vincent's guidance.  
Yuffie couldn't let herself be possessed by her will for retribution. She had to temper patience.

"Okay Vinnie, I'm all set!" With a mask of levity, Yuffie swung around from the bathroom door kitted in tan shorts and a navy tank top. The shower's haze shadowed her in light wisps, as she hopped and teetered out while tethering up her thigh-high boots. When she'd finally grappled the second wear over her leg, she tugged onto the dour gunslinger with renewed fervour, shuriken in hand. "Hey, totes none of my business, but are _you_ gonna wash? Like, at all?"

"I already have."

"No freakin' way!" Yuffie leaned in far more intimately than he preferred, snuffling around his chest with incredulity. "When did _that_ happen?!"

"Earlier." As informative as he ever was.

"What do you mean, _earlier_?!" she barked, aghast. "I was on the phone _earlier_! What's your version of earlier, ya' big _nightcrawler_?"

"Three o'clock this morning." With the utmost sincerity to him, Vincent made his way towards the apartment exit. Yuffie was left dumbfounded for a moment, trying to fathom his garbled nocturnal logic that still somehow kept him in command over his facets at this hour. By all rights, he should have been part of some undead host, held scantily together by the cords and fibres of raw will. When she paused to remember who (or _what_ ) he was, another pang of unexpected affinity tweaked at her heart-strings. She felt herself changing and maturing, and at this rate, it might well be a swift metamorphosis - come better, or worse.

"Whoa, I almost forgot how _weird_ you are!" Yuffie called out after him, slamming her apartment door shut. "You never disappoint, Mr. Valentine!"

* * *

Vincent leapt across a gap between two buildings to join Yuffie, his footfalls muddling shallow pools of rain. Surrounding them was the slummy hive of Grimhaven, that unfortunately familiar ambience of debauchery and avarice echoing around them like a hymn of the damned. If the Lifestream contained the living memories of all its myriad souls, then this sole District was the dingy vein of it into which every mortal sin and regret manifested.

"You find anything?" Yuffie swept around, binoculars lowered to her side.

"No sign of life from the Don's hideout," Vincent reported, sullen with fallen endeavour. "Nobody's shown up, and nobody's left. It's under lock-down, which wouldn't happen to the hinge of his whole operation. We can discount there."

"Damn it," Yuffie scuffed against the floor. Another opportunity squandered. "Well, I didn't find much out around here either!"

An engine burst within earshot down the street, trailing a stinking, black pall of fumes. Vincent lifted up onto the ledge, observing the racers tearing between the panicked flock of citizens, both poor and dirt-poor alike. The foraging rabble disintegrated apart at the blaze of boiled rubber, fleeing across stalls and up onto the curbs in crushed, hustling mobs that revealed the selfish natures of the bottom-feeeders that dwelt within this hole. Fists were slung, insults thrown above the crowd's upheaval, and lives were gambled by the same tightrope of fatality that each person balanced upon here every fleeting day. The two cars lurched into one another, a heated plume of sparks cresting their wake. They battled until one fought ahead, though not without the other's vitriolic shunts.

Vincent hovered above it all, before he dropped back onto Yuffie's level. He seemed uncharacteristically optimistic.

"Hey, what is it?" she roamed within the wildfire of his eyes, craving answers. "Hey, Vinnie! What's that look for?"

"Those racers," he proposed, absorbed in thought. "How often have they passed by here?"

"Uh, about every hour or so." Yuffie was beginning to follow his line of inspiration, albeit not wholly grasp it. "Why?"

"Call me the next time they do." Vincent swirled away, rent cardinal tapers brandished high over the stunned ninja's face. She vaulted over the edge after him, but after his unearthly pace and phantasmal fluidity, Yuffie was far behind before she'd built a rhythm. She slowed to a standstill, bereft of company.

"That's not what a phone's _for_ , ya' jerk!" she shouted out after him, the cusps of her boots peeking out over the far fringe of the rooftop. He was hopeless. Vincent's purled cloak flitted across the drab skyline, shrinking away like a healing wound in motion. "Man," Yuffie cursed, combing across the desolate rat's maze of the Grimhaven horizon, "I _hate_ it when he does that!"

She swayed around away from him in wide, sauntering steps, dwelling on his plan - and just how irritating his spontaneous, furtive personality could be. Every thought, every desire was entombed within him, never once surfacing in the truest of their forms. Perhaps one day she might thaw her way inside those glacial depths, and excavate all she could of what Vincent Valentine's heart pulsed for. For now however, she was reduced to shy wonders and intrepid dreams.

Yuffie supposed that they weren't entirely too intolerable.  
She wouldn't stand them as her comrades for life, though: the White Rose of Wutai was _always_ victorious.

* * *

Over fifty minutes of quiet vigilance later, and Vincent received the call.  
As expected, the manic drivers hurtled through the streets of Grimhaven. Acrid, bruised feathers of gas pinpointed their paths.

They were coming.  
He counted down, observing their treacherous sport from above: a gargoyle of lunar flesh. They swerved into view, antagonists unto themselves, fenders lop-sided and blemished, butting together in barbarous contest. Chips and embers drew out in conflagrant tusks, goring flaming spoors out of one another not unlike their predecessors that Vincent had stalked this far. They were a hundred metres away now, eighty, and still he counted... _Sixty_...

His cape abloom, Vincent descended upon them. Polluted gales gnawed and scourged against him.

 _Forty._

He gathered a surge of momentum.  
In a tempestuous blur, the earth lunged up towards him, its jaws toothed with debris.

* * *

Far across the District, Yuffie's stomach turned over with nerves.  
She hadn't heard back from him.

Her attention rapt upon the lifeless screen of her phone, she was entirely unaware of the brooding silhouettes that converged behind her.


	6. VI: Debt of Mercy

**VI**

* * *

Vincent landed, denting into the car roof, his footing precarious.

He sank upon one knee, but the falling impulse threw him onto his side, and he tumbled over the divots and crags of the now-misshapen vehicle. The force barrelled him back, but he managed to score through the rugged steel with his gauntlet. Its golden prongs clove through the roof with lesions into the surface like a beast's marks, and Vincent groaned out against the twinge that kneaded through his tortured left arm. Still he hung on, his determination undying.

"What the _fuck?!_ " the driver shouted up through the slashed grooves, the car veering with his agitation. "Get _off_ , ya' crazy asshole! I got Materia ridin' on this!"

Vincent swung his right arm onto the mangled garland carved into the roof, clawing and heaving himself back up onto it with strain. The man's heedless exclamation had come at the price of both the competition and his illicit Materia, although the gunslinger found that commiserations on his end were particularly difficult to come by. Vincent peeled the chassis apart, possessed by the erringly evocative image of Yuffie's devastation: he refused to lose another.

"Hey, did you _hear_ me?!" The criminal went to rap upon the car ceiling with his fist; he was met only by the choir of sweeping wind through a gash, and Vincent's ruthless, iron clasp around his wrist. The dead man levered the driver out of his seat, and flung him away in cold-blooded abandon. The wailing racer spattered against the rubble-cobbled road, skin mown away from muscles once, twice as he tossed awkwardly over the torrid tarmac. His forearm was sundered in half, jagged roots of bone skewered through the burned deformity of what was once a recognisable limb. Fragments of his pelvis ate through his hip.

"Every word," Vincent commented mirthlessly, and couched himself in behind the wheel. That man wouldn't die, but he'd learn. And he'd remember.  
Soon the driver's ruin was a blemish in the rear-view, the flock of bystanders little more than murmurs beneath the raucous engine.

He tailed the first car's fumes, grimacing through the swarthy nebula that funnelled out over the windshield. Every now and again it receded, and evanescent slices of the world returned to him, but Vincent was steering through a cloud. Hunter and hunted slalomed between traffic, the blaring fury of civilian horns slipping into afterthoughts with each passing nick and dimple of their hoods. Tyres screeched, and the bilious tracks lifted away. Vincent was fatally careering towards the corner of a hotel, straddled between a twin fork in the road. He wrenched the wheel to the left, lashing pitch-dark stains into the pavement from the heartbeat choice. The car lurched up onto the sidewalk, its wing-mirror clipped off in a flashing salvo, grinding intimately against the wall. The mismatched paint of the passenger-side door was sanded away in wide, grey cross-hatches, and once back onto the road, Vincent reeled from the car's desiccated suspension.

 _'I truly hate driving',_ he reminded himself, barely necking across the front of an oncoming supplies truck in a broad arc.

The other driver had flattened the accelerator. He wove dangerously through needle-thin breadths between congestion, his expertise acquired through these daily death-matches. Vincent counted himself fortunate that this wasn't a legitimate race - if it had been, he'd have conceded at the wing-mirror loss.

He just needed a direction, an _answer,_ no matter how deficient his own driving skills were.

Far from Vincent's expectations, the pursuit took them around the northwest periphery of Edge. The first car sheered off to the right, snaking down a tunnel. Vincent hounded it, his right hand beginning to blister, as the strips of sunlight were eclipsed by a long, dark ceiling. Crowbarred crates, sodden boxes, refuse sacks and homeless pilgrims from afar (their journeys made sadly redundant after the Midgar exodus had bloated the city) fleeted past in soft background smears. The confined acoustics of engines screaming at their limits, browbeaten under the feet of their masters, led a ghostly anthem through the underpass.

The outside light gleamed into Vincent's eyes, as strict as a whip's kiss: they were in the wastelands.  
An arid, lifeless purgatory of earth.

Dust enrobed the leader, but the gunslinger wasn't restricted to the streets. He skewed off-course, bracketing around it. A hollow finger of wood sprouted up on their right, the first of two tree carcasses that stood as racing landmarks. Vincent's target cut across him immediately after the second stump, deeper into the badlands, over hillocks and gullies of Gaia's withered crust. There was an eminence in the landscape ahead, a mouth carved into it. Vincent followed inside, the cave's throat dingy and lit only by the faulty headlights that cast weak, chalky points perhaps fifteen, twenty feet ahead. The unsanitary emissions now intertwined with the musty, low-hanging air of the underground, forming a ripe canvas of gasoline and rot.

Cheers resounded through the passageway, which brightened at an alarming rate.  
On either side were torches that bore immense and arrogant flames, enough to illuminate the other car already at a standstill below.

The driver clambered out, hailed by an uproar of jeers and festivity from the men who greeted him. Across from them were parked five other cars, each as bedraggled and worthless as the next. Their only purpose was to become the fiery tomb of the next unlucky soul to climb inside. Vincent, as ever the black sheep, drew in several yards in front of the apparent victor seconds shy of the applause. However as he surfaced from the vehicle, the joyous mood wilted.

"Hey, what the hell?" called out the driver; "that ain't Tomo!"

"We got ourselves a rat outta its cage, no?" another sneered.

As if a legion of shared thought, they each simultaneously unholstered their weapons.

"No shit, this goon's messin' with us!" another from the congregation slanted the scope of his handgun. A rookie mobster, Vincent deduced, and little more. They were clothed in the same sort of careless, back-street heterogeneity as the so-called 'guards' outside the Don's old metalworks facility. Their numbers fuelled the thug's hubris, who continued, "here for the Don's Materia, eh boss? You get yourself a bellyful of it when we toss what's left of you into the Lifestream, yeah?"

Vincent, unconvinced by his grand charade, marbled the man's face with bullets. The three bloody gorges - one between his nose and pulped eye, and two more through right cheek and left mandible - seeped profusely, gleaming from the dull metal studs burrowed into his skull. His jaws worked even into death, biting, chewing out unsung insults, babbling feverishly. The others around him erupted with rage and horror, emptying whole cartridges towards the intruder.

"Fuckin' _kill_ him!" roared one, slinging an assault rifle down from his shoulder.

Vincent sailed backwards over the car, an inundation of gunfire coursing after him. Flares speckled across the vehicle's open flank, hustling and shoving it with their sheer volume, gutting the front tyre. Their prey was crouched behind it, tending to his ammunition reserves, ensuring he had enough to spare on them.

"Wait up," ordered the assault rifle-wielding hooligan, Den, who had taken the opportunity to manipulate the frantic spirits of the others into his command. A guard prised from a hockey helmet was fastened over his mouth in a grate, and his head was shaven into a monochrome-chequered mohawk. Even though he held up a hand to stop the bombardment, stray shots still picked away at the car. "Yo, ammo costs us a _right_ fuckin' _nut_ , so quit while you're ahead. We got his dead ass cornered already - I said, stop _FUCKIN' SHOOTING_!"

He aimed the sights towards the hood of the car.  
Right where the engine was. The flammable, rickety old engine.

 _"Ea-sy, no!_ "

Bullets were expensive, but Den's own ego was priceless. He unloaded what was left, the rounds embedding into the car's innards. His arms were numb from the chattering recoil, steadying the gun now a laborious and difficult task. Tassels of smoke licked out from the punctures. Den's ears pleaded for him to stop, the bullets' percussion pounding his hearing from him, but he listened to nothing but the tantalising promises of his own ambitions. Reporting this success to his superiors was bound to culminate in a promotion - Gil, higher places, and extravagances: the mad butcher's delirium was written across his face.

The others behind Den launched themselves behind the cover of the opposing car.  
Spines of fire bristled through the vapour, passionate and cataleptic.

Vincent disappeared behind a distended gulf of flame, as bright and fierce as magnesium. The charcoal husk of what he had arrived inside catapulted backward in a thunderous rupture, a downpour of its charred wreckage awakening the cavern. Roasted shrapnel and kindled intestines of circuitry pelted the surroundings, impaled windows and lodged into dry clay walls. Scorched air brooked across Den, singed and thrawn piping shearing away a clump of his beloved hair.

Above the calamity loomed the shadow of a dead man, torpedoing high across the subterranean sanctum. Cinders loosed from the frayed hem of Vincent's cloak like a river of starburst, and he slipped with superhuman prowess behind his would-be murderers. He squeezed back on Cerberus's trigger and broached a man's stomach with its howl. Strings of the victim's insides puddled out through threefold unclean gapes. Vincent pressed twice again in quick succession, blowing fist-sized sockets into another pair's chests before they'd managed to react to their comrade's unprecedented evisceration.

Again and again Vincent slew, growing tasteless, borderline melancholy towards the deed.  
No matter how many evils he laid to rest, he himself could not be. Not even the sting of a bullet grazing against his shoulder lifted his pulse. His flesh burned, the wayward shot having pierced through a nest of nerves. He was pinned. He couldn't keep stationary; he _had_ to move, and did so with some expedition.

Den hurdled over the car, assault rifle reloaded and keen.  
The earlier driver's head whiplashed in a bloody mist.

 _One left._

"Ah. Just you and me, no?" Den chuckled, patting the head of firearm. He was alone with a force of anti-nature. His earlier façade of triumphant conceit was washed-out, and a very afraid, very human guise brooked across his features. "All right, hold up! I'm not gonna lie man, you scare the _shit_ outta me."

Vincent frightened _himself_. What he'd done - _what he'd do_ \- dawned upon him in a constant, merciless cycle of both awareness and compunction.

"Look, my blood," Den cautiously raised his arms in surrender, gazing upon Vincent warily with a snakelike gaze. "I ain't got a chance, and I... I wanna live, okay? You're not a bad guy- you're not like _any_ of us, without question. Hell knows _what_ you're like, but... damn, you got a shred of mercy, no? Can you talk?"

Vincent's definition of 'good' and 'bad' men were indistinct. The odour of death, rich and prevalent, was a fine example. He had killed five men here. He had filled eight or nine graves during the trafficking raid yesterday. How many had he forfeited of their lives altogether, in this increasingly insurmountable quest for absolution? How many had Yuffie, Cloud, or Barret taken prematurely? Heroes and villains were, to him, an immature and simplistic dichotomy of a morality that was greyed from the very minute a human soul had borne conscience. They were constructs of history, of different sides of different arguments. He, and the rest of his fellow band that referred to themselves as the world's protectors, had fractured apart husbands from wives, children from mothers, all for the sake of principles that they deemed superior to the corpses at their feet. What had being 'good', or 'right' served him? A caress from the nether-realm, fragile personal value, and an abundance of self-reproach and judgment: perhaps, Vincent wondered, it was time to do away with right or wrong altogether.

"I prefer to listen," Vincent glared over the hungry barrels of Cerberus in response. "You, on the other hand, seem to talk a lot."

"It's saved my life a few times, no?" Den wrinkled his lips in retort, "why shouldn't I enjoy it?"

"It's going to save your life again," the gunslinger offered. "Cast aside your weapon, and get in the car."

With uncertainty, Den complied. He didn't have much space or time to conceive of any other options, even if he'd have denied Vincent. He hitched off the strap looped through his assault rifle, which settled onto the minefield of broken glass underfoot. Cautiously, he treaded over to the driver's-side door, and shifted himself into the seat. Vincent hung by him, surreptitiously tipping his activated homing beacon in through the back window.

"What's your game, man?" Den asked, his eyes thinned and distrusting. "Where do you want me to go?"

"Anywhere." Vincent was already walking away, cloak flown high and ominous in the shades of his movements. The gift of mortality was punishment; the gift of life was a blessing. Perhaps in giving a chance of life and not claiming one, he might have restored his own. "Fly fast, and fly far. Your new life begins now."

With Cerberus primed, Vincent ventured further into the chasm beyond.  
They had been hiding something there.

Something vast and divine. Something dying.

The Lifestream.

* * *

Yuffie felt a hemp noose collar around her throat, suffocating her.  
Her assailants yanked harshly on the rope, and hauled their fettered, writhing prize onto her behind. The tether rubbed blotchy, rouge burns underneath her chin from the friction. She floundered and kicked out vehemently against her captors, her heart in seizures, rending and scratching against the bondage.

"H- _hey_...!" she choked out, hoarse. "Wh- what's the... _agh,_ " she gagged; "what's the big idea?! Lemme _go_!"

"Don't worry, we are." The voice from behind her crowed with amusement. "It's just that anywhere _you_ go, we'll be _right_ behind you."

"Damn she's cute," muttered another. "You think we ought'a... you know, break her in for 'em?"

" _Break me_ \- what?!" Yuffie scrabbled at the leash, vainly burying her nails into it. "Is this some kinda... _ack_ , joke?"

"Yeah," the first answered, together with an audible crack of a hand clapping against the back of a skull. "Silas here forgot that you're a _princess_ , right? Gotta keep you intact for marriage, sweetheart. Luckily, we've done you and your family the honour of pickin' out a suitor! The Don doesn't shut up about ya'!"

Yuffie's blood ran in frigid streams. She visibly stiffened against the mention of that name, cringing against the thick rope. It wasn't a struggle for her life: it was for everything that she held dear in it. Her independence, her strength, her spirit. The portraits of those girls, watery and repressed in her mind, were beginning to flood back to her in full, cracked clarity. Their emaciated ribs. Their gaunt, stick-thin arms and legs. The way they'd been deprived of their souls, of their futures and pasts, never able to explore, or dream, or smile, and if they did it was because they slinked off to their isolated quarters thankful of his neglect. Yuffie was the White Rose of Wutai, she told herself, and she'd not only save them but she'd save herself too. The ice in her veins simmered. Then it boiled.

The ninja rolled back, not away from her detainer, but towards him.  
She angled herself on a slant, on her left shoulder, so that when she finally surfaced, it was within a feather's breadth of him.

With a spontaneous, mind-numbing thrust of her bony knee between his thighs, the man folded down with a wheeze. She vaulted over him in time to fist the thin locks of his hair, follicles taut in agony, and with one chilling splinter of a broken neck, distorted his spinal cord. A gratifying shiver gathered in her throat.

"You _stupid_ bitch!" one snarled, attempting to reload in haste. "Don't make me snap those pretty little legs - the Don's got enough _cripples,_ already!"

Dragging the rope free before the muscles clammed, Yuffie swept her shuriken from her back and propelled it in a swift, salient crescent towards the two. It blitzed between them both, its razored limbs severing joints and tendons under arms and dislocating their weapons. It danced like an errant buzz-saw between them, bare vessels spilling abundant bloody rivulets down over diced wrists and slippery fingers.

Lastly, devotedly, her weapon swirled back into her well-trained hand.

"You _dumb-asses_ sound pretty acquainted with royal etiquette!" Yuffie hewed through the noose with the edge of her shuriken, loosing it over the quivering body at her feet. She planted the sole of her boot over his rasping mouth. "So, why don't you remind me what happens when you _screw_ with a _princess_?"


	7. VII: Limit Break

**VII**

* * *

Two of Shinra's finest strolled into Don Santeo's lap of luxury, suited in black.

On the left was a surly, strapping individual. Ever the consummate professional, Rude straightened the frames of his sunglasses in anticipation of their message. He pinched them with fingers clad in Junon's finest leather, fashioned personally by a tailor he'd known since boyhood. Exuding the strictness and severity of his job description, his stern attitude was mirrored in amount only by the confidence that brimmed from his partner. Beside him was Reno, who was leaner, crowned by cerise locks drawn back into a ponytail, and had sheathed his silver tongue - for now. Upon the redhead's shoulder was propped his trusty telescopic baton.

Before them, the Don of Grimhaven feasted, chewing sloppily over the applause of the Turks' polished shoes.

"Yo." Reno's smile was sly, vulpine, and without an accent of sincerity. "This ain't so bad... but Shinra's made better investments."

"Piss off," Santeo growled, chewing into a Chocobo thigh. With the tough, cooked sinew pulled open, oil dribbled down his chins. "I haven't done anything to Shinra, and I don't want any of you here!" He pumped his fists against the arms of his throne, a child's tantrum. "You're spoiling lunch! Get out!"

"We'd love to," Reno's eyes shimmered devilishly. "And Shinra would _love_ more of your old man's money, too. I guess we can't all get what we want. You see, you and I both know that he survived his... _accident_. We agreed to look over the rock he crawled under, so long as Shinra got the lion's share of his profits. But _someone_ went and pulled the plug. Someone _stupid_. And now, that same _someone_ is livin' large off what rightfully belongs to Shinra. We call that..."

"... _Embezzlement_ ," finished Rude, pulling his gloves taut.

"I haven't _done_ anything!" yelped the Don, spitting grimy residue over his breastplate. The stained, bronze armour glimmered with the same peculiar lights as it had during his visit last night. That was a pleasant memory - or at least, Miss. Kisaragi had been. "My- my beautiful girls, you... Come! Come here!"

Reacting to the irresistible allure of their master's voice, the slave girls obeyed unconditionally. Once again their protective harem flocked around his swollen mass, each as clueless and braindead as the next. They moved upon intangible threads, personalities as wooden as their ill-exercised joints. They maundered around him in a carousel of mesmerised addicts, a roulette of the broken, the diseased and the pregnant. The Don lunged out and bundled onto into his sweaty arms, and she giggled absently, her desires mere ventriloquism. He was safe now, his giant slab of a forearm lumped across her boyish chest, so awfully malnourished her ribs jutted through papery skin like rake heads. Her mascara was dry now; it hadn't been earlier, and whiskers of it were still evident across her pointed cheeks. Don Santeo reclined back into his throne with a newfound conviction in his well-being.

"Now, uh..." the Don grappled onto the girl's jugular. "Now then, you wouldn't put a young girl's life at _risk_ , would you?"

"Hey Rude," Reno cocked his head over to his partner, rapping his electric baton against his shoulder. "You hear that? The guy thinks we've got morals..."

"Hey Reno," his fellow Turk snorted wryly. "You see that? The guy's arm isn't broken..."

* * *

The passage led Vincent into an expansive circular chasm, which excavated deep into the planet. A rippling cyan radiance dappled the chamber walls, heavenly in appearance as it undulated as though alive, around which were stationed refinery arms. These were crane-like appendages that lowered into the Lifestream below, drank from its abundance, and purified its offerings into unrefined Mako energy. Threading them together were conversion cables that fed into the central crystallisation core, a large rectangular platform built upon a natural bridge of deep-pressured earth.

And yet, what captured his curiosity most were the emblems soldered onto the sides of each refinery arm, and onto the central crystallisation hub: _Shinra_.

These were Shinra's machines, Shinra's technology, and perhaps even Shinra affiliates, yet he'd heard only of the Don's presence. It was a passing thought whether they had been stolen, but from their comfortable foundations and visible signs of wear, they had been stationed here longer than the Don had even drawn breath. Age crusted across the mechanisms, not yet rendering them inoperable, but certainly having an impact upon their productivity. Apparently this underground affair wasn't only illegal and clandestine, but it was also parasitism of the most desperate and self-serving kind.

Vincent heard Gaia grieving for the sins of her children.  
Each plant of his boots sent a sombre echo throughout the Materia mines, ostensibly deserted.

"Shovelling up all our dirty secrets eh, string-bean?" boomed a familiar voice. "Ha- _ha_. Soon enough, I'm not gonna have anything left to _enjoy_!"

Wrenching the crystallisation silo's entrance asunder was a man of phenomenal build, with a hairless, stitched head. Above his left brow was a white, tumescent burn mark impressed into the suit of clubs. Vincent identified him as one of the guards outside the aborted trafficking hive in Grimhaven - either Hawk or Kestrel - and pinned him with a vitriolic stare. He brought Cerberus in line with the brute's eyes.

"I know what you're thinking," the enormity chuckled, scuffing at his burn. "' _Which one of 'em is he_?' It's _Kestrel_ , in case you were wondering. I know we haven't been introduced. Not directly, anyway, so I'm the asshole the Don assigned to oversee all the Materia production." There was a bright throb of cobalt to his irises, as if something else peered through him. "So, got anything _you_ enjoy? I hear _Wutai girls_ are all the rage these days!"

"I wouldn't know," said the gunslinger, his cadence slow and hostile. "But you were right: a night inside an interrogation cell _will_ deprive you of everything."

"A _cell_? You're not done with the bloodbaths _already_ , are you?" Kestrel roared derisively, "that was the most interesting thing about you!"

"Bloodbaths?" If Vincent was bewildered, the frigid tundra of his profile did not betray it. "It just sounds like drivel to me."

"You're a bit out of touch, aren't you?" snorted Kestrel, "oh, there's _rumours_ about you! You're the bane of every mother in Grimhaven trying to get their kids to sleep, with the _Red Ripper_ running loose! Although... they're not strictly rumours, are they? All those boys you gutted open, in Owl's shop of surprises...!"

"I'm not the one defending a ring of human slavery." Vincent was sharp to exonerate his actions, and even more so his thoughts. What this titan among men lauded and congratulated was offensive _._ It was a thorn that had pricked against his conflicted conscience, which was rapidly deteriorating against reason. Vincent had never been one to conform easily to society, nor had he any interest in doing so, but to be ostracised as the conductor of such butchery through the weapons of a few underhanded words had managed to enflame him - in part, despite all of his protests against it, because those words rang true.

 _Murderer. Ripper.  
The bane of lives.  
_

 _The unworthy reaper.  
_

 _Chaos._

 _Sinner._

His enemy prowled closer.

"Nah. You're the one blowing the _brains_ outta a bunch'a poor kids' skulls!" Kestrel quarrelled aloud with a flair of theatricality, addressing an audience of his own reckoning. "Here's a conundrum for you, string-bean: you shoot up a shit-ton of our guys, all of 'em runts and runaways with guns shoved in their hands for cheap pay. Homeless, starving rats we pretend to give some responsibility to so they can grow up. You leave a goddamn swamp of what's left of 'em behind you, and yet, you do it 'cause you think _we're_ the ones ripping away lives from people? You're an arrogant fucking hypocrite, aren't you? That's hysterical!"

He moved closer still, their bridled, burning tension coiled, its fangs unsheathing...

"There's a difference between those who deserve punishment," Vincent preached, "and those innocents who are exempt from it."

"Careful now," Kestrel held a finger aloft, chiding his enemy. "Once you start deciding how and why the scales of all other people are weighed, you'll lose your mind! Unless that's already happened, of course. I'll imagine those frightened little rats aren't the only ones who die when that trigger's pressed, Vincent!"

When that trigger dragged another soul to Hell, pieces of Vincent Valentine - one after another - were torn away with them. The dreamless void beneath the Shinra Mansion; gurgling, fresh exit wounds upon Hojo's floor; the crystalline crypt of the woman he'd loved, however, these all remained, stagnant and damning. In all of his futility, every warm and precious memory had flaked away from him. Those he'd sought to shed were permanently carved into his psyche. No matter how many lives he'd judged, how many of the deceitful and vile he'd ended, he'd only grown more forlorn. The heads of Cerberus faltered.

Kestrel picked up on his moment, a rabid hound to a waft of blood. He charged Vincent with unprecedented aggression, driving a shoulder thick and packed with raw muscle past the barrels of Cerberus and into the gunman's chest. It struck with debilitating force, and Vincent careened back onto the rattling mesh floor with the limp weight of a rag-doll, spine ablaze. Kestrel was upon him, not sparing a fraction of grace for his stupefied opponent, pummelling him with huge fists that bludgeoned into the cadaverous-white sculpture of Vincent's face. Slick, crimson ivy surged from shredded cartilage, and cheekbones began to capitulate.

"So in this ' _perfect_ ' world of yours, I should be _punished_?" Kestrel dragged Vincent's head up by a fistful of hair, only to deck it hard against the platform with a juggernaut's punch the shiver of which was palpable in the Northern Cave. "So why aren't I _getting_ punished, Vincent?! Why's my head still on? Why are my arms arching with _ecstasy_ when they draw back to beat the _SHIT_ outta you?! Why are _you_ the one lying there, Vincent, bleeding to death all over my hands?!"

Blood bubbled inside Vincent's throat. His jaws hung open, croaked, unspoken words weak and unintelligible. He groped faintly for Cerberus.  
His head swirled, absent in a dazed soup of abstract reality. His dead heart resuscitated, mortally threatened.

"No more _shit_ to spew?" Kestrel popped his dripping knuckles.

Vincent's fingers latched onto Cerberus, but another brutal blow loosened his grip - together with the rest of his body.

" _Yeah_ ," Kestrel leaned up, admiring his handiwork with a satisfied groan. "Stains aren't so fuckin' _righteous_ , are they? When you're the mess that's gotta be mopped up, suddenly your bullshit fetish for 'justice' is all gone!" He paused, hitching a brow at the clumsy shifts of Vincent's hand brushing up against Cerberus. Kestrel wondered to himself just how many lives that gun of his had reaped, and clutched around its triple barrels. The frail attempts of the beaten and vanquished Vincent Valentine were for naught. He had been caught, disarmed, and now he looked above, bleary and disoriented, into the grave once more.

Kestrel slung Cerberus away to his left, and it clattered out of sight and reach in among the nooks and crevices of the sleeping monitors.

"Oh, so _close!_ " mocked the seven-and-a-half foot giant, tutting in revelry. "I don't know _what_ you were trying to pull there, champ, but... damn, close one!"

Vincent's breaths were shallow and waning.  
He hadn't felt this in a long time.

 _Desperation_.

That dreadful, sinking sensation where every nerve left intact inside his body stood on end, alert and afraid. Downward he fell, through a bleak and vacuous abyss, his mind searching, hoping, clinging onto every thread of every eventuality and one after another, they frayed and snapped in his hands. The very last time he had been cast into this wretched emotional ravine had been before an entire generation of which he had been robbed. Conquered and desolate, Vincent savoured it all: the betrayal, the pain, the torments, the losses of that Hell. He manipulated the cold wires that plucked against his heart to electrify and animate it. Not idly would he allow himself to return to the soil again. Not so easily would he be overcome and thrown back into that unending, woeful underworld.

 _No more._

His life force wasting away, Vincent keeled up and mauled gilded talons into Kestrel's scalp. He poured every fading ounce of his stamina into ripping his arm back, cleaving through the sewn cleft that followed around the curve of the other's head. It gaped apart, and Kestrel reeled onto his side in screams saturated with throat-rending shock and horror. Vincent was too exhausted to accompany his act with remorse or pleasure, and collapsed back onto the floor in defeat.

"You... fuckin' _bastard_ ," Kestrel seethed, clambering around on the grated metal. From the yawning rift of skin that now folded down over his temples was a steady brook of luminous turquoise plasma. He lurched up onto his knees and bawled violently, "you retarded, lily-faced, string-bean bastard! _FUCK_!"

Kestrel rose to his feet unsteadily, the upper half of his face peeled down over the other in a grotesque simulacrum of humanity. Beneath was a synthetic black skull immersed within new, fluid flesh. Vincent eyed him in a half-conscious delirium, discerning the liquid that haemorrhaged over Kestrel's sputtering lips and corded neck to be Mako energy. Tics began to rustle throughout Kestrel's arms at random, his hands clenching without will or rhythm, his tendons growing rigid then relaxed like blades of grass against the wind. Across from him, the blood that matted across Vincent's features had started to coalesce, his brain mutating.

 _Murderer. Ripper.  
The bane of lives._

 _The unworthy reaper._

 _Chaos._

 _Sinner._

"You pulled my damn _face_ off," the thing that was Kestrel raged, "that fucking _hurt_! Ah... months of surgery gone to _shit_ , how about that? Well, I guess you can't hear much. I've scrambled that pretty face of yours up real bad, so your ears are probably _gushin_ ' with blood."

Vincent wasn't listening. He wasn't alive.  
The ruddy flow that congealed over his face had acquired a glossy, white appearance. Gored into by two indistinct, unearthly gorges where his eyes should have been, and pock-marked throughout, the bizarre mask that formed was nothing in comparison to the undead behemoth that Vincent was metamorphosing into.

 _Murderer. Ripper.  
The bane of lives._

 _The unworthy reaper._

 _Chaos._

 _Sinner._

"So why don't I pull _your_ face off, bastard?" Kestrel loomed over the convulsing abomination beneath him. "Corpse versus corpse."

The sound of a chainsaw shuddering to life bode the second round.


	8. VIII: The Hellmasker

**VIII**

* * *

Kestrel leapt backward, narrowly escaping the saw's bite.

The Hellmasker was even more gargantuan in stature than him, having invaded the rawboned physique of Vincent Valentine. Carmine pinpricks seeped into the eyeholes, smouldering wicks of its host's spirit. A fracture crawled along the surface of the gauntlet, widening under the rapid inflation of turgid muscles regurgitated forth from beyond the nether realm. Its complexion was murky and clammy, as if moulded from wet cement. Its ill-fitted vestments stretched out in moth-eaten patches across its body, a rusty coloured cloak draped over a half-nude torso of marbled grey. Over its incoherent rasps bayed a wild chainsaw.

"Christ," Kestrel hissed disparagingly. " _That_ ain't gonna help your reputation, y'know!"

The Hellmasker lunged forward, uncoordinated and feral. It swung its hefty weapon downward, but Kestrel twisted side-face out of its path. Sparks frothed from the mesh, disfigured by the whirring teeth. He countered with a steep knee to the mire of the fiend's gut, and once more, beating into the rubbery flesh. The Hellmasker had unhinged its chainsaw from the floor, but Kestrel had already followed his assault through with a vicious uppercut to the hockey mask.

"All that despair," the cyborg chastised with a guttural moan, "all that self-loathing and guilt-mongering... I told you before that it'd break your mind, but you've been totally _consumed_ by it, instead! And I have to say, I like the results! Feels good to let loose, huh? To kick off that _ball and chain_ you call _morality_?!"

The inscrutable face that swept around towards Kestrel was webbed with splinters from the prior impact. The Hellmasker wagged the razored edge around in a frenzy, and while Kestrel managed to duck below the first curve, could do little to avoid the second. He raised his forearm to absorb the impending ruin, the superficial layer of skin slashed asunder, flecks of mangled epidermis becoming caught up between the revolving fangs. The chainsaw tunnelled deeper through synthetic sinew and grated with falsetto shrieks of metal against Kestrel's endoskeleton, streaking fluorescent plumes of Mako across the both of them.

Not even pain inhibitors could control this... _rush_.

Kestrel lifted his boot and shunted the Hellmasker away for some respite, wincing and clasping onto the searing gorge into his arm. Lambent blood-energy coursed from it, and now maimed beyond use to him, the cyborg grasped upon his forearm and wrenched with a sickening tear. It was crucifying for any normal man, but these two had far surpassed any such definition. His human guise was being stripped away, fraction by repugnant fraction, and left unsheathed in a flurry of bright sap was a slender shaft. At its head was an opening, supported by a smaller, upturned branch beneath it that breathed a dim, blue flame.

" _Fifteen_ years!" Kestrel ignited the space before himself with a concentrated jet of Mako energy, which spewed out in intense bursts. He shambled ahead, warding away the Hellmasker, ranting aloud. "Fifteen years of my _life_ I pissed away for Shinra! For them _and_ their damn war!"

The monstrosity that was once Vincent Valentine retreated away by nature, but it was conducted by baser and more primal reasoning to kill. Quickly it reversed aversion into cornered aggression, and with a freakish contortion of its neck, the masked colossus bounded forward. Its head was lowered protectively, shielding itself from the punishing lashes of heat. The Mako flamethrower immolated the flesh and cloth hung over the Hellmasker's back, spitting a blackened, scabrous path down its spine. The rogue creature continued undaunted, inhuman through the torrent, and emerged - much to Kestrel's surprise - with enough strength left in its mighty arms to score the chainsaw across the cyborg's chest. Kestrel was hurled back, his pectorals smiling and sodden with ichor.

" _Ahh_ ," Kestrel crawled onto a knee, parrying the saw's falling stroke with the flamethrower's appendage. Metals squealed in their deadlock, and burnt flashes fountained across their eyes. Grimacing, he revealed a spite that until now had remained tamed beneath layers of senseless enmity, but was now whetted by the resurrected fervour for battle. "Rakasa Gorge! Ever heard of it? Crafty fuckin' _Wits_ * blew out the pass beneath a whole platoon of us!" The Hellmasker's unfeeling, macabre sight above him only sharpened his fraught inflection. "Ugh... _three_ _weeks_ we were trapped y'know, and only after all that time some SOLDIERs haul us outta the pit without so much as a _puddle_ to drink from! Half of us were batshit, the rest half-digested _just_ so we could stay _alive_! What would good old judge, jury and executioner Vincent Valentine say to us then? C'mon, you sanctimonious piece of shit... who deserves to die in _that_ fuck-up, huh?!"

The Hellmasker wasn't a fool. It was a manifestation of Vincent's limits, of broken and irreparable integrity, and of his killer instincts. It began to angle the chainsaw so that its gyrating head was in a position to thrust through Kestrel's bare skull. However, Kestrel was subtly tipping the flame-spouting limb at the same time. The two combatants unaware of one another's efforts beneath their own. The tension between their contradicting forces mounted, higher and more precarious, until there was a precipitous lull in opposition; their weapons disjointed. As the Hellmasker impaled nothing but the wind, Kestrel managed to slip away to the side, scathed in a wake of fresh Mako-seeping wounds.

"I know you're _in_ there, Vincent!" the cyborg's obsidian skull chattered with laughter, "and I want you to hear _every_ word, you mopey string-bean bitch! 'Cause you know what they _did_ when they dragged our starved asses out to freedom? They filled us with bullets, every last _one_ of us! It was a fucking _slaughter_ , Vincent! One of those _bloodbaths_ you love _so_ much! Couldn't trust _madmen_ , they said - couldn't trust a bunch'a _cannibals_ , they said!"

A swathe of heady, warm light snaked around him, and broadened out into a zephyr of skulls; a merciless affliction.  
 _A 'Nightmare'_.

The Hellmasker advanced upon him pitilessly.

Kestrel lifted his weapon, and doused his foe in a wicked expulsion of Mako. It raised its arms, but the endemic of flames spread ravenously across its upper body. Soaked in the onslaught, the Hellmasker whined out in uncharacteristic panic, swatting futilely at the contagion that ravaged and melted it away.

The foul and noxious redolence of boiled meat smoked off the carcass.  
Sludgy clumps of its body sagged off the bone, and Kestrel babbled with sinister delight.

The Hellmasker advanced upon him pitilessly.

Time rewound, victories were forgotten, and Kestrel raved on. "They did it all because we were _blemishes_ on Shinra's damn-darlin' name!"

With each imposing step, the Hellmasker seemed to grow at an inordinate rate, as if it were trudging down a deceptive hallway.

"I could've died a hero of the war! I could've been a fuckin' _hero_ , Vincent! And I would've died back there with all my men, knowing I did right by what I believed in! I could have had that fuckin' _charity_ , at least!" The environment trembled. The air itself became stifled and haunting, unbreathable and heavy with the monumental footfalls of the Hellmasker. Kestrel roared at the impending doom in his final act of defiance, "so the next time you start spouting all that bullshit about who deserves to die, you _remember_ _me_ , Vincent! Remember whose remains were _skinned,_ and wrapped around this walking metal _coffin_!"

Its risen sole blotted out the cave, swallowing Kestrel's world whole.

The Hellmasker advanced upon him pitilessly.

 _'What the...?'_ Kestrel looked around himself with a degree of paranoia. ' _What the hell is going on?'_

This time, however, he was entirely lucid. The past two visions bedevilled his mind with the clarity of a recent and vivid dream. The cyborg looked upon the image with a muddled sense of déjà vu. Knowing neither which was present and which would echo into yet another superfluous ordeal, he stalled for time.

"This is another trick, isn't it?" Kestrel asked, opening out his arms. "Just-"

The chainsaw skewered through his skull, abruptly ripping him out of his unconscious trance. His head snapped back violently. The oscillating blades acted as a slim blender, whisking and deforming what lay inside into bloodied mechanical mites. He stood upon his feet, frozen and speechless in the expectation of another esoteric reawakening, but there was no such revival. There was no rebirth for him. The longer the chainsaw raged and delved inside him, the more abundant the deluge of Mako bio-plasma became, the sooner Kestrel came to the mortifying realisation that this was it: this was how he was going to die.

He was afraid the first time, too.

The Hellmasker dislodged its chainsaw from the cyborg's vandalised face. With a final insult, it whirled its gore-soaked instrument aloft and guided it through Kestrel's throat. Slowly, maliciously, the monster severed through it, savagely, void of respect or honour. Thudding lifelessly onto the floor several yards away, mouth unhinged and eyes forever petrified, Kestrel's disembodied head was very nearly bespattered by the lustrous Mako-blood geyser after it.

In its wielder's loosening grip, the weapon began to die. Its revolutions slacked, its indistinct and speedy hem now becoming focused and the small teeth individually visible as they rattled around. The engine failed. The Hellmasker's fingers thinned, as though drained of moisture, into Vincent's sleek, porcelain hands. The mountainous entity shrank, clout and girth confined to the gaunt, desecrated living corpse of Vincent Valentine. Gaia's cold, naked abode brushed against his exposed body, concealed only by the threadbare rags that adorned him. His transformation faded away, a brutish and rueful episode of which he would have little memory. He limped towards the cavern passageways, ambling forward on sheer will, before passing out into a misty-eyed oblivion.

* * *

Yuffie followed one of her would-be kidnappers down a manhole. The ladder leading down into the sewers was dank and spotted with mould, so she was grateful that she'd been impetuous enough as to have ignored it. The assailant's footsteps receded around to the left, and she sprinted off after them.

"Hey, get your butt _back_ here!" she shouted through the labyrinth, "so I can kick it all _over_ again!"

Running beside her was a shallow sluice of squalid water. The only sources of light were rippling chevrons of it cast down by the grates in the streets, the atmosphere funereal for all the degraded waste and corroded relics of the upper-world. Yuffie bolted by, oblivious to the myriad eyes that lurked within the archways. She'd broken off from the traditions of her people, and as she shirked her environment, she'd haplessly deserted yet another. She was vindictive, not that she let it blight her ever-so _charming_ personality, but since this man had connections to the Don, Yuffie saw blood. She darted behind him, springing from the right-hand path over the feculent sewerage and around the next corner, panting not out of exhaustion but from vitriol; she was gaining on him.

There was a door at the end of the hallway, thick-set and with welded fortifications to contain flood-water.  
 _'Don't you dare!_ ' Yuffie scowled, closing the distance. She could hear him huffing and labouring from the exercise - another untrained grunt, then.

He slithered in behind the door, attempting to heave it shut. Yuffie slammed shoulder-first into it before it could fully close, the ache conjuring a mewl of discomfort from her. She pushed against it with her back, both feet grounded, trampling furiously into the concrete to lever the threshold further ajar.

"Don't..." Yuffie strained, barking out, "ugh, don't you know it's _rude_ not to hold a door open for a lady?!"

"My apologies then," she heard, before all resistance disappeared.

The door suddenly collapsed inward with ease, and Yuffie sprawled in with a yelp. She'd chafed her knees against the floor, and found herself kneeling in a cavernous sanctum surmounted by a large, square grate glaring up into the bustling streets above. Pervading the room, from corner to corner, was a legion of hired mercenaries each of whom brandished an array of weapons - from machetes, sledgehammers, nailed bats, meat cleavers, to firearms ranged across every bulk and caliber available on the market. Her pupils shrivelled. She fought for the door, but the man she'd tracked there finally sealed it with a foreboding, bass vibration of locked steel. As she peered around like a trapped animal, her sights set with stomach-swaying upset upon the ponderous raps of a walking cane.

"You're growing prettier every day, my... _mm_ , darling," Don Santeo budged through the crowd. His left arm was bandaged up in a cast, bound awkwardly against his chest with such fastened security that it looked like a misshapen claw. "Don't worry, we'll get those knees of yours healed in no time."

"Oh, _God_! Of course it's _you_ \- you ugly old _creeper_!" Yuffie bristled up, her skin palpitating with disgust. "Leave me alone! Look, I might be cute, _that_ I can admit - but I'd _KILL_ myself before I let you rub those sweaty old paws all over me! You're _gross_ \- and that goes for _all_ of you, you're...!"

"Yeah. That's a point," the Don agreed aloud, patting his blubbery lips. "Take her weapon."

" _No_...!" Yuffie was in no position to be uncooperative, but as a sea of hands rushed to obey their superior she gripped tightly onto her beloved shuriken. Through the bullying shoves and wayward stamps of boots against the backs of her calves to stake her down, she held onto it as though it was her own child. "No, you can't- hey, get _off_ me! _Stop_!" She had the strength and reserves to combat them, but when they pried open her fingers, one after another, the pillars of her courage were picked away. The wheel had been a reminder of who she was, why she did all that she could to preserve the sanctity of her homeland; it was the link to her family that had once been, to the ancestors that didn't prevail her here, and to everything that she fought for. She squirmed heatedly, fighting and challenging and denying them wherever she could afford it. " _Stop it!_ " When they wrested it from her cold, sticky hands, they'd also taken her heart from her.

Her memories hung on there, the fuchsia ribbon fluttering morosely as the shuriken was passed around between the men. Yuffie tensed up her leg muscles to press off and near enough scratch out the lungs of the man who dared tarnish that irreplaceable souvenir, but she was kicked forward brusquely onto all fours.

Falling forward, her hands empty, she gazed up at the Don with scalding acrimony.  
She wouldn't let him see what he'd done with that order.  
She wouldn't let him see her scrunched nose, how she battled the tears that threatened to undermine her.

"Give it back," Yuffie hissed. "Give it back, you... _asshole_! Or I'll...!"

"Or- or _what_? You'll go around _all_ of us here," he sniggered, hobbling around in a circle to illustrate his point; "and uh... uh, beat us all down like _dogs_? Uah-ha-ha!" he dabbed up stray drool with his sleeve, boorish hiccups of amusement jiggling his many sunken necks. "A funny one, as well as utterly delectable! But we didn't come here for a fight! And... _mm_ , I'd say we didn't come here for what you think, either! Dirty-minded little princess, oh, I like you... _haw_ - _haw_..."

"So why bring 'em, then?" Yuffie snapped back, "here's an idea - instead of being a sick old bloater, why don't you just _piss off_ already?!"

"Two reasons," he stuck up his fingers atop the cane, like half-melted sausages. "Two bits of... uh, _insurance_ , if you like. The first bit was making sure that this wouldn't be our last meeting, because I'm really quite fond of you, Miss. Kisaragi, _yes_... I had to sure I took something valuable from you while conserving your... _mystique_ to me," the Don waggled the two digits suggestively. "And the second bit was so that we could have a little chat without interruptions, _mm_..."

"You wanna chat?" Yuffie wasn't about to embark on some leisurely partnership with a man who had committed his level of depravities. Her middle finger flexed up, proud and tall, in a crude and flippant gesture that illustrated the spirit she'd inherited from her father's earlier years. " _There's_ your damn _chat_ , ya' waste of skin!"

"Your friend, Vincent Valentine, has been a very busy boy lately." The Don ignored her churlish attitude with that of his own. "Or, I suppose as the papers will call him, the uh... the ' _Red Ripper_ '! Yes, he's killed a lot of my men... A lot of slum men, and young men, with lots of _families_! It's like he thinks he can get away with daylight murder because they work for me! Bah. It's a very big blood debt he's building up on this... martyr's crusade, _yes_..."

Yuffie flickered her attention over to her shuriken, the ribbon of which was being pulled at mockingly by a few of the crowd. She felt nauseated, tugging her shoulder abortively against the custody of two arms that hooked around under her armpits, effectively muzzling her.

"I can't help it if the people want him _dead_ ," Santeo resumed. "But it doesn't _have_ to be like that, oh no! There are other ways to settle blood debts, princess. Ways that can even _benefit_ us, you know. As you can see, I... heh, I was paid a visit earlier today by..." he rumbled with anger, motioning with his broken arm. " _Shinra!_ And it just so happens that I've been talking to your father lately, mm... Nice man, very traditional, not at all humble... and it seems like you'd both appreciate a helping hand in putting the _dying_ _mutt_ of Shinra out of its misery! Nobody likes it! Nobody trusts it! Your father's grown soft in his old age, but I can talk him round. He doesn't want to fight because deep down, he knows he'll lose... but not with _me_! If you were to become, ahh... my bride, and squeeze out a few legitimate heirs of mine into your Wutai bloodline - _haw, haw_... Mr. Valentine would get out of all this unharmed, and Wutai would be given more than enough Materia to _crush_ what's left of Shinra for good! Now imagine all of that... Your pretty face sculpted into Da Chao... Revered _worldwide_...!"

" _Go to hell,_ " spat Yuffie.

The Don sighed. She was shaking, both from the venom of her anger and from visible trepidation, although her futile efforts to obscure the latter were truly endearing to him. He shuffled closer to her, streeling his cudgel-like foot behind him, until his retch-inducing stink swam into her nostrils. Yuffie recoiled away, chewing down onto her lip to soften the squeak of distaste that surfaced automatically from his mere presence. He brought his arm around her, his palm splayed out over her back, and held her firmly against himself. She writhed helplessly, her cheek squashed up against the bronze fastened over his dilated torso.

He arched down, stiffly and uneasily, to lay three languid kisses upon the crown of her head.  
His breath trickled down over her face in a balmy effluvium, and she gagged in disgust.

"Then I'll take Vincent with me," Don Santeo said, combing through her short, deep locks as though he owned them. Yuffie, bound and defenceless, refused to let him see her break - even as he fanned through her hair, as a lover would, and cradled her right up against his abdomen. She gazed upon him, livid and humiliated, but not broken. Not yet. The Don pulled away from Yuffie, leaving her to gasp and recompose herself. "But you'll think it over, won't you?"

* * *

* **Wit** \- A prejudiced slur against the people of Wutai. Mainly used by Shinra personnel during the war, its use has diminished in recent years.


	9. IX: Malice, Malaise

**IX**

* * *

Yuffie's head hung forward as the Don's men tethered a blindfold around it. She exhaled through her nose with a quiet, frequent intensity, tempering the gradually unbearable pressure that was welling up within her. To endure was to be _human_ , Vincent had often told her, and now she felt the most human she'd ever been. As one who chirruped buoyantly through life, light of both fingers and her word, Yuffie didn't enjoy swallowing the bitter pill of reality.

"Stand up," Don Santeo instructed. A mercenary's rugged hand slapped onto her shoulder in coercion.

"Hey! Watch the _goods_ ," the ninja snipped. "I-...!"

The back of the unseen assailant's hand slapped loudly across her face, yanking her neck in its wake. Containing her stunned whimper, she winced and tasted the tang of raw iron upon her lower lip. It had been blemished and snagged by the rough stroke of a ring. Wounded by the spell of amusement that diffused throughout the assembly around her, Yuffie scowled and pushed herself up one leg after the other with a resistant and all-too _human_ pride.

"Yeah, _you_ ," the mercenary jeered. "Cause it's all about _you_ , ain't it? Shut your mouth ya' Wit whore, or I'll kiss your other cheek too!"

The world around her was a nihility of cruelty, anonymous taunts and whistles that pecked at her ears and heart, eroding away at the already-worn foundations of her patience and dignity. The Don, like a peer-pressured boy in class, snorted and jeered along with them. Each and every meticulously-kept veneer of ego and resolve, all of them built up over the years of her insubordinate youth into her current thick skin, was being thoroughly tested. Yuffie fought against it all, freezing her emotions in a tribute to her rock. She resolved to finish this quickly and painlessly. These men would _not_ see her cry, and they would _not_ break her.

A firearm's muzzle prodded into the eve of her spine, and she jumped.

"Walk on, there's a good girl," ordered Santeo. With her head held up, Yuffie took a distrustful step. She scowled, her sore lips soured, the black cloth that wound over her eyes a thin but welcome protection from the sight of the Grimhaven Don. She walked through a scorning hallway of hired thugs, some leaning out with audacity to shove and heckle her to the cheers of the others, yet even as her honour was trampled beneath them, she did _not_ break her.

She heard a door grinding open, resembling its twin behind her. Through it emanated the noise of running water, not unlike a babbling creek.

"It's a pity that you weren't more _obedient_ this time around," the Don crooned, nesting his plump hand on her shoulder. His nostrils flared above her clavicle, her sweat-diluted fragrance tantalising his senses with desire. "Had you just given yourself to me... mm, _whole_ , I wouldn't have to do this."

"You _done_?" Yuffie crept forward, but the Don restrained her. It was then that she came to the revelation that she was poised upon some sort of precipice, through a series of tentative pokes of her shoes against the moist brickwork underneath her. She steeled herself, straightened up, and tried to remain as _Vincent-like_ in her prudence as possible. Anything would have been better than _this_ company. "You gonna throw me in, hurl-breath? Then get it over with!"

"Oh, I _like_ this," Don Santeo whispered in adulterous craving. "You're beginning to understand the situation a bit more, aren't you? Yes... _Yes_ , you're starting to come to terms with the fact that I can do _anything_ I like with you, here and now." His tongue slithered out, slick and scummy and earthworm-like, and lapped wolfishly against the paled silk of her skin. Yuffie's lungs were alight. Hairs across her nape turned to cold stone. Her blood seemed to congeal out of sickness, his mouth contaminating, roaming, defiling as it sought out the pleasures of her vulnerability. At last he withdrew with a sloppy, vile smack of his lips, a quivering, elated moan only stirring her hatred of him more. "I could make you into such a beautiful _woman_ , Yuffie... I could be _inside_ you Yuffie, I could-..."

Yuffie threw her elbow back into his temple, a lightning-stab of rejection.  
The Don stumbled, nursing the welt with bleating curses.

"No! Get back inside!" he barked out to his men. "My little _princess_ was just... mm, being a little feisty, a little, uh... _playful_!"

"Try that crap again and I'm _jumpin_ '!" Yuffie threatened, considering the leap regardless.

"Go ahead," the Don unravelled her blindfold. The fabric fluttered away, and the daughter of Wutai squinted down into the tenebrous depths. Below was an unplumbed chamber into which gushed festering sewage, from one mouth to another. Peering deeper, Yuffie spied an enormous, wax-white blotch that rippled suspiciously beneath the pool's surface. The stench was abominable, and she hesitated to lean in closer to identify the lurking, formless mass. The contents of her chest were tugged down into her stomach when a girl's face dipped up through the muddy swill, startling her, flinching her back with a scream.

"That's where I throw away my _bad_ toys," Don Santeo murmured into her ear.

The dead thing's right socket had been cored out through decay, rotten vessels reaching out through the liquid dross, clambering higher and higher as if to beg Yuffie to join them. The thief scoured in a cold sweat over the many dozens of waterlogged young women, each in different stages of decomposition. They were anchored down there by chains, lulling in their drowned grave like seaweeds of bloated, ashen flesh becoming day after day increasingly mouldered and necrotic.

The faces multiplied.

They emerged through the greenish, agitated waters; they materialised upon the walls, summoning and chiding her to them; Yuffie could feel their harrowing lullabies calling to her, reflecting off the sewage's spume, scurrying like a frightened horde of insects into her mind.

Yuffie's breathing was hasty and shallow.  
She was overcome, hyperventilating, her lungs searing from the pace.

She forsook reason and thought, and reacted only to what spiked up through her conscience in a mad, impetuous hysteria. Yuffie grappled onto the Don's breastplate, scrabbling, diminutive fingers clawing under the grooves and accents of its bronze plating. Gripping onto him with all of her might, with the conviction of her own soul - for _all_ those girls, for _all_ of those yet to come, and just as importantly for _herself_ \- the ninja swung around towards the steep.

She didn't move him far. She didn't need to.  
The repulsive mound didn't budge, but his foot caught on the jut of her calf.

The Don floundered, grasping around for shreds of her garments to haul over with him, but he was now gravity's slave. The pervert plummeted headlong into the septic bowels, wailing and blubbering from the fall. He impacted hard, scattering upward a large, flyblown discharge of refuse.

Driven on something indescribable, something primordial that tapped into her inner animal, Yuffie hastily trawled the door shut over the delayed upheaval of the men inside. She wheeled the seal clockwise, tightening it further and further against the rackets of gunshots and percussive beats of weaponry caving into the steel. Paranoia flushed through her veins. She had to stop them from getting through. She had to spare herself. She had to _run_ , to _escape._ Against the backdrop of Don Santeo choking, raging and squalling as he was subsumed beneath the smutty, putrid waves of his own making, Yuffie all but tumbled down the flight of stairs to her left, seeking out a ladder, some vestige of the world above and away from the smothering oppression of lost sanity.

 _Out,_ was all she could think to herself; _gotta get out...!_

Bruised and tainted, Yuffie scaled up towards the blinding crescent of a dislodged manhole. The clamour of buffeted metal behind her only hastened the climb, and unsettled, she lost her footing on one of the slippery rungs. She cussed, scuffing against it once, twice, making mistake after mistake. Using one hand she heaved against the hefty plate, her palm wet, bleached across from the effort. Yuffie scampered up onto the roadside, rolling away onto the curb as a passing vehicle droned its horn at her. Her pulse galloped through overworked insides, their intensive labour pounding fresh, hot blood through her veins that drummed into the sides of her skull. Panting and distraught from that unforgivable secret, Yuffie spurned the gaggle of concerned onlookers. She pushed away their hands, seeing only the milky, dead faces of those girls that she and all others had failed to save. It was breaking her. Fault by fault, the guilt encroached closer.

Yuffie's phone awoke in her pocket, alarming her. Roused and vibrant, the screen listed Reeve's name.  
As disconcerted and uncomfortable as she was, she had to adopt a charade of bravery.

"Hey," she answered wearily, pressing it against her ear. "What's up?"

"Ah. Quite a lot, actually," the WRO Commissioner reported, unusually sombre. "I couldn't get you for a while there, is everything okay?"

"Oh, yeah! I'm great," Yuffie lied. "I'm _greater_ than great! I'm the _greatest_ \- uh, what's goin' on?"

"All right then," Reeve replied, his skepticism unabashed. "It's our friend, the squealer. He just got abducted from the cell blocks, while we were out responding to Vincent's alert beacon; squealer's _gone_. Right now, we don't know who coordinated it. Although, to be honest... I've got a pretty clear _idea_."

"Ugh, I know! You don't have to tell _me_ who!" Rather, Yuffie _wished_ that he didn't mention the Don by name. She didn't need a reminder of what she'd just experienced. Nerves agitated, she added subtly, "I hope he _drowns_ , or somethin'! But hey! Hey, hold up a sec! What do ya' mean? Where's Vincent?"

"Well... that's the _other_ thing," Reeve admitted grudgingly. "When we tracked down his beacon, all we found was a run-down car and an equally run-down driver. He led us to where he'd been sent from, after a little persuasion, and what we came across was pretty nasty stuff. He was bled out in some underground Mako mine, miles out to the north. Truth be told, Yuffie, I haven't seen him in such a bad condition in all the time I've known him."

"Is he alive?" A pang of dread stabbed through Yuffie's heart, "Reeve! Tell me he's all right!"

"He's out like a light, but he's stubborn. He'll be fine." Reeve caught the ninja sighing with relief. She supported herself against a wall in the Grimhaven market-street light-headed and feverish from the unexpected solace. She was balancing a very fine line as it was, and this had almost cracked her open. "Nothing a few _hyper-expensive_ potions out of our supplies can't clean up, anyway. We'll have to reset his nose at some point, too, but the poor guy's seen worse days."

She harried him for reassurance, "so he's gonna _live_ , right?"

"Yeah, Yuffie, he'll live."

"Thank _God_ ," Yuffie's voice quavered emotionally, before she picked herself up. She sniggered awkwardly, bashfully. "I mean, what a dumb-ass, right? He thinks he's bad now - just tell him to wait 'til _I'm_ there! Wutai chicks _never_ forget, y'know!"

"Why don't you tell him yourself, in the medical wing?" Reeve asked. "I'm sure you want to be with Vincent while he recovers. Especially with how you both-"

"Oh, _please_ ," Yuffie interjected, as pert as she wanted him to believe her to be. She was ecstatic at the prospect of reuniting with her partner, an almost juvenile spur of excitement that dwarfed her recent distresses. At his name, Yuffie was positively radiant with her old energy. "Vinnie's stuck onto me like a _limpet_! See what happens when I let him outta my sight for a few hours? I'll be right there, and then we can talk _strategy_ \- Yuffie over and out, chief!"

* * *

When she arrived in the emergency wing, however, it wasn't Reeve she discussed anything with. Vincent, as passive and still as the day that Cloud and the others had uncovered him underneath the Shinra Mansion, lay within the smooth white sheets of a recovery bed. The bridge of his nose was plastered beneath adhesive surgical strips, cushioned by cotton. Cylinders of potent potions threaded intravenously into his left arm, his chest - as sallow as if its entire form was a living scar - rising and sinking in the languor of unconscious breaths. He looked at peace, far too much, and Yuffie's chest gripped her with fear.

"Yo, rise 'n' shine, Sleeping Broody! This is your wake-up call!" she tweeted, striding with self-assuring confidence over towards the window. "Woah, man, is it a geriatric ward in here or somethin'? Talk about _stuffy_!"

The blinds were the focus of her pent-up emotions. At first she reeled down the wrong side, snarling them up. She simmered, every influence of the past day effervescing beneath her bright and vivacious image. It was ' _human_ ' to endure, Vincent said. As she tangled up the hanging drapes, scrambling them up with huffs and growls of chagrin, she was through with that likeness. She glared around at the patient. After today, she'd had damn near enough of feeling ' _human_ '.

" _The-re_ we go!" Yuffie declared proudly, at long last cycling open the blinds. The afternoon sunlight clothed the room in a fresh, colourful spectrum, and reinvigorated the once-bland walls with its bouquet of warmth. She turned to Vincent, rummaging around in her shorts. She plucked out a jade marble, talking openly and cheerily as though he could listen to her. He was as receptive as normal, at least, and that was the only real comfort. " _Ni_ -ce 'n' sunny in here, _just_ how you hate it! Anyway, I bought you this sweet 'Revive' Materia. Kinda ironic, I know, but I can't, uh... really equip it. _Crazy_ day! Also, _teeny_ -little disclaimer, no big deal - when I said 'bought', I meant I got it on a 'Yuffie discount', but you don't _really_ mind, do ya?" Silence. "Yeah, thought not! You're welcome, pal!"

More silence.  
Haunting. Isolating.

"Damn it," Yuffie perched herself on the bedside chair, anxious with anticipation. "What were you thinking, ya big jerk? Going off all on your own, thinking you've gotta hold the whole world on your shoulders! Well, listen up! Ever think the world's just not worth it? You drop an egg, you make an omelette; maybe if you let go of all your burdens too, you'll get somethin' even _better_!" She fisted at the hem of her shirt, tensed up from the abortion of her delivery. She'd reflect back on this moment with a migraine in the future. "All right jerk, play it that way! When you wake up, I swear I'm gonna knock you out all over again! Y'hear me?!"

Onward Vincent slept.  
Onward she panicked.

"Hey, wake up, Vinnie!"

Reeve hesitated from knocking, his knuckle loitering by the door. Through the small square of bevelled glass, he caught Yuffie cupping Vincent's hand with her own. She leaned over, sneaking in a sweet, yet meaningful caress of her lips against his cheek before retreating sheepishly back to her seat.

"Please, wake up..."

Perhaps Reeve would give them both today.  
With a disbelieving smile, he left them to conduct his investigations alone.


	10. X: Pulse

**X**

* * *

The day's experiences had made Yuffie restless and irritable.

A WRO nurse was currently tending to Vincent's condition, and Yuffie eyed her with a hawkish fascination. Evie was outfitted with a beret of damask rose, and a short-sleeved cream tunic that was embroidered with a stark red cross. Her blonde hair was tied back into a bun, but a stray tousle curled down beside her eye. As Yuffie observed every minute detail, marred lips pursed like a student in research, she hadn't overlooked how attractive the thirty-year-old was. _Damn her._

Yuffie envied Vincent's placid slumber, empty of all those ghoulish faces. When her eyes closed, they haunted her, blaming her. She shifted and squirmed in the bedside chair, the wood having numbed her behind an hour ago. It had been almost two and a half hours of waiting collectively, and for one as active and avid as the young thief, remaining at his bedside had been difficult enough without being driven stir-crazy. She was in a recovery of her own, oddly quiet and introverted - even more so than she was aboard an airship - with those endless, spectral faces looming within the hind quarters of her memory. Her eyes, usually so ebullient and fresh, were darkened around their edges with an eerie physical empathy of the sort of guilt that had cannibalised Vincent from within.

"Is everything all right, miss?" the nurse asked, bringing the Wutai heiress out of her stupor.

"Oh, yeah!" Yuffie beamed superficially. "No worries! But hey, you think you could uh... juice him up in his right arm, instead? Vinnie doesn't like people messin' with his left arm, he gets _way_ sensitive about it! I know, weird right?"

"He'll be awake soon." Evie pencilled in the figures she'd gleaned. "I'm afraid it's too much of a risk for us to dismantle all the equipment at this stage."

"Aw, jeez," the ninja swung her legs with impatience. "Like that stuff with the materia, then?"

Yuffie had learned that recklessly abusing 'Revive' materia was more detrimental than anything else. Unless it was absolutely incontrovertible that patients had been unconscious for under an hour, hospitals and healing wings refused to equip 'Revive' materia or employ the use of Phoenix Downs. The brain's convalescence cycle entered into such depth that they would, at best, be rendered impotent by that time. At worst, there was the potential for amnesia or brain damage. Yuffie had chalked it up to good fortune - perhaps the _only_ instance of that day so far - that she'd been stripped of her weapon back in the sewers.

"That's right!" Evie glanced up from her notes, catching the despondence in Yuffie's tone. "He's made it very easy for us, though. Mr. Valentine's body is extremely resilient, and it's shown signs of regeneration even before we examined it. Physically, he's in good shape. In fact, he's in wonderful condition!"

"I don't wanna burst your bubble lady," Yuffie countered; "but if he's doin' so great, why's he not _outta_ this place already?"

"That's a good question," the nurse tucked her clipboard beneath her arm, clearing her throat. "What's keeping him here is an ' _exhaustion of the spirit'_. Simply put, he's burned out. He must've experienced something that rapidly drained him of all his spiritual strength. His brain has effectively shut down all processes except the most vital ones, effectively undergoing a 'reboot' of his faculties over the course of a few hours. I suppose in addition to what I mentioned before, this is another important reason why we shouldn't hastily throw around Phoenix Downs, or Revive spells for medical purposes."

"Ahh, this _sucks!_ " the thief whined. "That lazy ass is getting on my _nerves_ , already! Wake up, idiot!"

Evie presented a tolerant smile towards the outburst, understanding all too well the emotional charges that these circumstances aroused. Sensing the exasperation radiating out of Yuffie in hot-headed waves, the nurse beckoned her over. Although it was an effort to kindle feelings of responsibility in the patient's partner, Evie had also intended on reconciling the girl's ever-so palpable boredom and its ensuing tension.

"Do you know how to check for someone's M-Pulse?"

" _Impulse_?" Yuffie inquired, canting her head. "What's _that_?"

"M-Pulse," the nurse pronounced slowly. "It stands for ' _Mana Pulse_ '." The puzzled vacancy across the younger's features compelled the nurse to elaborate. "It's okay, a lot of people don't really know what it is, since it's a medical term. It's kind of tricky to explain in one go, but try to imagine a second vascular system."

"Huh? But I don't have two sets'a _veins_!" Yuffie flexed back her hand and scrutinised her wrist, peering closely at the cluster of arteries there.

"That's because it's theorised that as people evolved from the Ancients, all their spirituality became confined to the eyes." Evie gestured to her own, and the thief nodded in gradual apprehension. "It's why SOLDIERs were recognisable from Mako exposure by the glowing taint in them. Some think that the Ancients once had those sorts of eyes too, but lost them over time as punishment for the human population. Dark, huh? To think heartbreak can be a real ailment..."

"Oh _yeah_ ," Yuffie griped. "A butt-ton of cripplin' guilt just from being born makes the evenings just _fly_ by, _thanks_!"

Evie blew air through her nostrils in grim mirth. "I'm sorry." She pressed her index finger upon Vincent's upper eyelid with feathery and expert precision, lifting it, and with carefully thumbed down the lower half. The nebulous white of his sclera cut through the opening, a semicircle of vivid crimson iris bleeding out into it from above. "Here. It's quite a small and delicate area, so look closely and be gentle. With your other hand," she dictated, following her own instructions with perfect discipline and practice. "You then apply a _li-ttle_ bit of pressure, and _roll_ the fingertip down. You should feel two quick, brief pulses, like a heart."

" _A-a-ll_ right!" the thief sidled past the nurse, leaning down over her partner. "Sounds like a pinch! Let's go!"

Yuffie pried open Vincent's eye, but its cold, milky texture jolted her; those floating, dead faces had that same glassy appearance. She retracted her hand as though his skin was incandescent to the touch, her breath shaken. This was ludicrous. She was the descendant of Wutai, of Leviathan itself. Why on _earth_ was she so possessed by fear towards all those incidents lately? Yuffie had looked into the eye of an impending apocalypse, and still emerged triumphant.

So, why was she so affected by it all?  
She wasn't _that_ tired. It was beginning to gnaw away at her, a little too intimately.

"Something wrong, miss?" Evie's gaze fluttered between the two.

"Just, uh- just felt a little weird, that's all! No biggie!" Yuffie covered, waving off the concern. "I got this!"

Wriggling her fingers clean, the ninja splayed Vincent's eyelids once more. It was performed gingerly this time, with the utmost awareness of those previous, resurfacing demons. While peeling back his right eye, Yuffie searched across the brilliant flame of its colour. The nurse had been at an arm's length; she, by contrast, was so fixated on success that she found herself hovering with less than a foot of breathing space between them. She craned her neck away from him, self-consciously flickering her sights over to the nurse. An unfamiliar and jarring heat hatched within her, and graced her cheeks. _Brilliant flame_ , indeed.

That was quite enough passion.  
She was ogling him like some besotted scientist over a petri dish, and it felt bizarre.

"Miss," Evie coughed quietly, attempting to dissuade Yuffie.

" _Oops,_ " the thief jabbed into Vincent's eye with all the elegance of a rampant behemoth. To her surprise, it blinked, recoiling as she twitched away the offensive finger now besmirched with tears. She wiped the essence away onto the bed-sheet, abashed laughter clothing the scratch her pride had recently suffered.

" _Miss_ ," Evie glanced towards the gunslinger with hopeful persuasion.

"Hey! I told you, I _got_ this - _WHOA_!" Yuffie poised over Vincent's gothic visage, which brooded - _awoken_ \- with silent, caustic reprimand up towards her. She squeaked and started backwards, blood surging through her with shock from a pulsating heart. "Why didn't you _say_ somethin', jerk?!"

"Mr. Valentine," the nurse strode over him. "How are you feeling?"

Vincent glared towards Yuffie, who had been startled up against the frame of a radiator. Relief blushed out across her, a graphic and stimulated depiction of sincere happiness that diverged from the inclemency cast forth from the dead man. After a gruelling few moments he uttered dryly, "my eye hurts."

* * *

Reeve was contemplating action when he was visited.

His room was a vault of information, bordered by monolithic shelves stacked with blueprints, scavenged Shinra documents, leases and encyclopaedias. The remainder of it was a skeleton of necessities in a mahogany desk and chair. The WRO founder stood however, preferring the company of Edge's skyline, which he observed pensively through a grand window. The final ebbs of sundown projected a prism of dim, tawny shades like the Planet's own hearth across the walls.

Yuffie scurried in first, all but prepared to swing her arms akimbo and deliver a histrionic welcome for her partner.

Snuffing out any such jubilance was Vincent Valentine, dressed in his trademark, mystic apparel of gore-cloth and gold.

Yuffie's awe still hadn't entirely worn off. He'd risen from the bed half-nude, a valley of veins prominent along the defined, sterling banks of his musculature. Vincent emitted a series of low, guttural moans, neither human nor bestial, but something absent of description or being; something absent altogether, existing without nature. Through some preternatural act of osmosis, his blood had perforated through his pores in a dense mist. It had condensed, becoming a tangible ruddy whorl, which manifested as material garments. His silver, anaemic complexion was no longer a mystery to the thief, even if it had spurred hundreds more.

"You just don't give a damn about my feelings, do you?" Reeve was as snide as Vincent remembered him. "What, you didn't like the clothes I had made?"

"You have my thanks for your hospitality," the gunslinger answered. "But give them to someone who needs them."

"And your gun," Reeve pondered aloud. "Should I give _that_ to the homeless, too?"

Vincent's snowy dispassion was all the impetus that the Commissioner needed to stop his unrequited efforts at humour. Reeve leaned down by his desk's right row of drawers, against which was propped the triple-barrelled firearm. With a sterling glimmer, Cerberus bowed through the air and embraced Vincent's grip.

"While I'm happy to see the both of you up and around again so soon," Reeve continued, "there's got to be a 'bad' for every 'good'. That's the way of Lady Luck's infamous 'equilibrium', unfortunately. Since this morning, the whole district of Grimhaven's been on the warpath."

"But you didn't _do_ anything!" cried Yuffie, who hopped in place from emphasis.

"Not against _us_ ," corrected Reeve. "Against _Vincent,_ here. Seems that our friend the Don's been sowing some _very_ malign seeds among his people. They're calling you the 'Red Ripper', my friend; Gaia knows what sort of macabre tales they're spinning as we speak." Despite this, the Commissioner's mouth twisted into an uncertain grimace, broaching the subject of his misgivings. "It's horrible, but... I mean, what _were_ you thinking, Vincent? A handful of gang-bangers with machine guns is a whole different kettle of fish than some kids from the slums, for pities' sake!"

"As distinct as a lie from the truth," Vincent furled his arms, thoughtful. "I would have thought you'd be familiar with common propaganda by now, Reeve."

"You're right, of course you're right," Reeve rubbed at the bridge of his nose, exhaling stress. "Look, there was no easy way for me to make sure. This was a delicate operation. We can't just gun our way into this one, I told Yuffie as much this morning. Fortunately enough, I _have_ been examining our options."

"That's our Reeve!" Yuffie cheered, "always with a plan!"

The Commissioner nodded towards her, ever-devious. "Naturally. These people are sheep, blindly accepting what's thrown their way. I've spent long enough with Shinra to know how to manipulate them, even if it's pretty damn hard on my ethics. That, and I'd rather _one_ person have to die than a whole city of them."

"So who's gonna get popped?" Yuffie pumped her fist, the reunion with Vincent having endowed her with the energy that had previously deserted her.

"This whole deal essentially is about who can make that district _hate_ them the least," Reeve proposed. "And if our Don friend's riled them up this much, then he's just given us his trump card. It's going to get a lot easier now, Vincent - because all you need to do is die. You've had plenty of practise with _that_ , right?"

* * *

Owl loped through the streets of Edge with a hobbled gait, hunting down Seventh Heaven with his men.  
It was nightfall now, and dusky shrouds of indigo had veiled the sun.

The bar's address had been something of a 'welcome back' compensation gift to him from the Don, who had refused to show himself in person. According to the trafficker's superior, Vincent Valentine's treasured companion owned it - a beautiful trophy, by all accounts. Allegedly, she was more ravishing in physique than the women that the eunuch had known; then again, he had known only the bucket-scum of Edge's population ever since his migration there. Slather built up between his jaws, hungry for this delectable prize that he'd reap with his own infernal hands.

Owl sneered in anticipation of what he'd do to her, rows of mismatched and soiled teeth wilting his lips into a dreadful, sleazy smile. Revenge plagued him. Since the gunslinger had removed all that he was as a man, the emasculated and demeaned thing that he had been forcibly transformed into thrived only on _revenge._

He thought with _that_ , he cherished _that_ , and he lived by _that_.  
A gnarled, repugnant set of morals.

He lurked by an alleyway, his croaking whistles of laughter dying down. Owl turned towards the throng of a dozen blood-thirsty comrades, subduing their aggressive enthusiasm with a bony, erect finger nuzzled against his lips. Glass bottles scraped and clinked against refuse containers and masonry, their alcoholic contents audibly swilling around inside. They were a living, reeking insect of many scuttering legs, satisfied only with the vile, the primal and the degenerate.

Owl grinned wickedly, pointing towards the face of the Seventh Heaven.  
The lights were still on.


	11. XI: Deathblow

**XI**

* * *

Tifa swirled a rag around the rim of a pint glass, which was festooned in soapy water.

Business was uneventful. Her regular, a thickset man in faded denims by the name of Cawley, had trudged home not half an hour ago. Bemoaning of his unrequited daily infatuations, Tifa had offered the taxi driver her cursory advice of cleaning up his dependence on alcohol and an early night's rest. In the days of law enforcement beyond volunteer armies and the inane, legal tug-of-war between the WRO and Shinra, she'd been sure there were at least scattered mentions of driving while under the influence of a pulsing hangover. The Seventh Heaven was more like the Seventh Purgatory; a solitary, bare establishment.

Limping in was a swarthy man, his boots beaten against the protesting timber. He was tall and spindly, and while not conventionally intimidating, there was an animalistic glint to his olive eyes as he escorted in a rabble behind him. They edged in, one after another, like a peculiar, grinning shadow that distended and welled up as the corners of Tifa's polite smile began to recede in turn. There was something innately untrustworthy about them, something unnatural.

"Can I help you, gentlemen?" The barmaid staked into Owl's dark expression with a honeyed façade, one which - through all her years of experience wandering the continents of the world together with Cloud and the party - well disguised the thorns beneath this flower. This man exuded unethical squalor.

"Yes." She was a magnificent woman. Shapely and sweet, with enough candour and independence for him to enjoy claiming from her. He relished the prospect of tasting that feminine strength and freedom with his own tongue - perhaps over a barstool in shame, or given the amount of comrades he'd promised entertainment to tonight, he'd have no option but to sprawl her over the floor between them all. His thrawn, leathery fingers could spread her open, disgraced to the core, and a phantom itch tickled against where he'd once have fed down her throat. She was just a woman. She wasn't smart enough to unravel his deceptions. A cluster of warm, slick centres of ecstasy to mount, and fill, and conquer; no more. Owl simpered, "yes, uh... _help_ , yes... is very lost here, okay?"

" _All_ of you?" Tifa canted an eyebrow at their awful transparency. "My, that _is_ a situation. I'm afraid we don't do board and lodge, though."

"Oh, no! No!" Owl exclaimed with vigour, his pitch squealing and high. First they'd have to rob her of her movements and awareness, and restrain her. He searched around the bar, leering hungrily across the homely portraits and certificates that littered the walls, respirations fluttering and excited. He settled upon the only object his simple, lecherous mind could focus on without slithering back to Tifa herself. "No, _phone_! You can, um, use your phone for us, please?"

"And who would you like me to contact, sir?" asked the barmaid, playing out his ridiculous tale.  
 _So they want me to turn around?_ Tifa mused to herself. _And they're armed, too. Really - it's almost insulting._

"I have a _very_ good friend," Owl urged. He cycled his finger around, "and I shall give you letters of it, if you uh..."

She relented for the sake of curiosity, her cynicism only adding to her strategy. She'd survived the slums in Midgar, and this robbery or assault by a clump of braindead thugs wasn't the first that she'd encountered - it wasn't the first that Tifa had humiliated in utter defeat, either. From a distance, and judging from their cowardly, roundabout method of execution, she assumed that they'd be one smaller weapon lighter within the minute.

"Of course," she beamed affably, following her clientele's instructions.

Their eye contact snapped.

Uncertainty reigned.

The next few seconds were poised upon a knife's salient edge.  
Not a blink. Not a breath.

Only the creak of wood, the nod of Owl's head, and the grunt of exertion.

 _Now._

Tifa whirled upon on one foot, kicking the other with astounding force into an oncoming glass bottle. It shattered upon impact into a galaxy of diamond shards, her arm lifting to shield her eyes from its meteoric allure. There were two men thundering towards her, each wielding torn, lead piping. The first swing towards her was powerful but broad and predictable, under which she slipped with ease. She rooted her hand around the grey shaft in his grip, tautening out his arm as she twisted on her heel and wedged her elbow under his chin. He yelped, staggered back, his teeth gouged into his lip, and Tifa relieved him of his crude baton.

The barmaid parried the second man's oncoming blow, lead pealing out against lead in a shuddering collision. Tifa swatted the bar against his thigh with imperceptible sprightliness. As he buckled down against the sting, she swivelled around and grounded him headlong against the planks, planting him there beneath the mind-rending piston of her left foot. A third attacker was approaching the fray, but Tifa launched the pipe into bruising contact with his midriff. The first man recovered, but he was bewildered and disoriented; prey for her flurrying, iron fists as they blended the bloody kaleidoscope of his vision into black.

The third man stumbled forward, clasping his gut.  
Tifa wrenched him up by the roots of his hair, where he strained out in anguish until the rigid chop of her hand crushed his windpipe.

" _Shit_ ," Owl hissed. He propped his palms up against the backs of two retreating gang members, jostling and shoving at them. "What are you, pussies? Hold the bitch down, already! I want to make Vincent's pretty friend _cry_ for what he do to me! Hear me, bitch? You'll cry tonight when Owl hurts you!"

"What are _you_ gonna do, you sack-less little faggot? _Scissor_ her?" argued the one to Owl's left, acrid and defensive.

"Yeah, go fuck yourself," the right-hand muscle snorted, shouldering away the eunuch's grasp. "You said this was gonna be easy."

"You are _not_ to go! Fuck you, man," Owl snarled, clawing back onto the two like a persistent disease as they pushed through the thinned crowd. His anger erupted in inchoate sputters, his eyes bloodshot and livid. "You _fucking_ cowards! _Fuck_!" he cried out, before the one formerly on his right hooked a weathered crown of knuckles into the pervert's face. Owl pitched backwards with a pained, indignant shriek, cradling beneath his sodden nose. The two left him to smoulder, to plot and devise sinister and underhanded methods to punish the young barmaid so that he could vent his gall out on her contused, defiled remains.

"You _are_ to go, actually," Tifa called out above his fuming thoughts. "In fact, insist you _all_ do. We're closing up for the night."

Light, tottering footsteps pattered down through the rear corridor, attracting the bar's attention. Denzel rubbed his socket groggily, wearing an ill-fitted white shirt and loose pyjama pants. The young orphan's eyes widened in disconcertion as the scene unravelled itself, and swiftly both he and his guardian realised the error of his appearance; he was a vulnerability, now a target, in this unscrupulous trespass. Eight fiendish pairs of eyes gaped towards him.

"Tifa?" he looked uneasily towards her for signs of reassurance.

"Go back to bed honey," the barmaid bid firmly, staring towards the interlopers. Her heart was a tempest within her, one which blistered with the lightning of her trained aggression yet sunk, inundated by the downpour of what a single mistake could mean for both herself and Denzel. She was afraid, even if it never once became apparent upon her scorned disposition; she was afraid for everything - but that was the nature of being one who cared, who possessed a conscience.

"What's going on?" Denzel was frozen in place. "Who are these guys?"

"Go to _bed_ , Denzel! Go on, _now_!" Tifa shouted, prising her gaze away with a fierce lash of emotion. A mother was hellish when invoked, and now that higher stakes were involved, she found herself short of both forbearance and her well-worn humour. In that sliver of opportunity, Owl's withered hand latched around the neck of a spirit bottle suffocated with a plug of fabric, and he patted around his jacket pockets for signs of his lighter's bulge.

Affording himself some time, Owl barked, "seven against one, go! Go get the child! Make him _watch_!"

" _Run_ , Denzel!" Tifa scooped a barstool around in front of her using the crook of her foot, propelling it out into the path of a fourth man who attempted to vault over the bar and around her impregnable defence. He lurched, kneeing the furniture aside, but hurtled into the counter from his lapse in momentum. Two more confronted her directly, while the final seventh considered the unoccupied bracket of space around by Tifa's left-hand side. "Bolt the door! Hurry!"

At the same time, Denzel skewed around towards the back of the bar, towards his room, towards _safety_ , but a hand hitched around his ankle. "G-get _off_ me!" he stammered, tugging his foot back, the shivers of adrenaline punctuating his every breath. The fingers attached around him were unfeeling, even as he trampled them, clinging with the tenacity of a bramble bush. _What did Tifa say?_ Denzel recalled, incoherent and distressed, _what did- the head! The side of the head!_

Denzel pounded his free foot against the man's temple, just where he'd been taught. Again and again he struck against it, often scuffing against the scalp from nerves and sheer unpolished error, but ruthlessly enough to where the fingers loosened around his whitened skin. With horror piercing his heart Denzel was helpless against the oncoming shadow of a grown man, who lunged down upon him in a rash and clattering tackle.

"You all are _fucking_ useless," she heard Owl baying in the backdrop. "Fucking, _fucking_ useless! I will piss on your _graves,_ pussies!"

Tifa deflected away a punch with her left forearm, screwing her palm into the fifth man's stomach. The wind ripped up through his choked throat, and delirious, he flattened up against the wall. The sixth man thrust his boot stiffly into the small of Tifa's back, butting her into the fifth, who grappled onto her shoulders with a giddy and waning consciousness. The barmaid drove twin tiger's claws into his collarbone, rupturing it; the marrow collapsed with a violent crack, denting his chest inward. With fistfuls taken of his shirt, she pivoted him around with the ease of hoisting up an infant to soak the welt from the other previously behind her, before casting him, his lungs drowning in blood, across the wood. She whipped her foot into the sixth man's hipbone, and in the ensuing recoil, drilled his skull through the thick plaster of Seventh Heaven. He struggled for a moment, a pall of dust excreted out through the subsidence, before falling limp.

" _Denzel..._!" Tifa rushed towards the fourth and seventh men, the former of which had crawled over the bar in her absence towards the young boy. The latter brought up his fist to sink into the cowering orphan's cheek, but Tifa was incensed and caught him by the wrist. She snared the joint with sharp, muscular discipline, and locked his arm at a ninety-degree angle. The man winced and moaned with resistant outrage, hauled along like a leashed hound on three legs. Tifa slashed the guillotine of her shin into his jugular, and rasping horribly, he raked at his neck, writhing blue-faced and asphyxiated; a maggot's death. His comrade ambushed her with a vicious left cuff to the side of her head, and a second with his right; Tifa pedalled back in retreat, tinnitus keening stringently.

Behind the skirmish, Denzel gathered his composure, pushing himself up to his knees. At first his thoughts were to barricade himself inside his bedroom, but he couldn't live with himself if these men pulled some trick on Tifa. Cloud wouldn't have let that happened. Cloud would have had the strength to disperse them together with Tifa, instead of trembling away and becoming nothing but a hindrance. He _hated_ himself. Hurriedly, he plucked up one of the lead pipes.

"Hey, why're you fightin' it so bad, sweetheart?" the man manoeuvred through the labyrinth of bodies, calling out in arrogance. "You run a bar all by yourself, you've gotta be stressed to hell 'n' back, right? C'mon, don't be a frigid bitch, now... you _deserve_ it, parading around in those skimpy-ass clothes every day." His tongue darted out, dampening his lips with greed. "You _know_ what you do to guys, don't you, you little fuckin' _tease_? You _know_ what you're doing!"

"Kicking your greasy _asses_ outta my bar," Tifa countered angrily, " _that's_ what I'm doing!"

"I bet you get _all_ kinds of propositions, don't you?" his eyes glistened with a low, serpentine menace. "Yeah. And they ruffle those feathers of yours just the right way, don't they? You've gotta feel like queen of the whole fucking roost in here. Well, you brought it upon yourself! This was _bound_ to happen, lookin' like-"

Denzel tossed the lead pipe into the back of the man's crown, blood bubbling and festering as a bruise mounted there. The last man blundered towards Tifa, and she shattered his front teeth with a single, wicked blow. She withdrew a bloodstained fist, like a miniature graveyard of enamel, only to cave in the man's forehead against the blunt corner of the Seventh Heaven counter. She resumed callous, wrathful heed of Owl, who had kindled the head of his lighter.

"I say to you," the trafficker growled, haggard with fury, "I say, bitch _cry_ tonight! It was not joke- I... I am to make you _cry_ , I know how! Burn in hell!"

Owl tilted the spirit bottle against the head of the lighter, holding aloft the makeshift torch as it ignited. Rampant, the fire seeped across the cloth as an infection would, rumbling and bountiful. In a twisted, hiccuping bout of hysteria, Owl bowled the lethal cocktail past Tifa. The glass burst asunder in an ungodly conflagration that smothered the décor in torrid, raw limbs of flame. Against the sweltering ash, Tifa's first instinct was to swaddle Denzel from the blast.

"Denzel, get down!" she screamed, one of the bodies' legs kinking up between hers. She tripped, all breath jetted from her lungs as she hit the ground.

The orphan, aghast and glued there in paralysis, watched the tactile, almost organic burning tendrils scaling up towards the bar's liquor cabinet. The Seventh Heaven shivered from the force of the explosion, an enormous skyward blaze that carved through the uppermost floors of the building. Molten timber supports capsized inward, riddling the bar with a toxic deluge of smoke. Tifa rose, shaken and sooty amid the inferno, scouring out signs of life that were no longer there.

"Denzel!" Tifa coughed, hot tears simmering upon her eyes. "Denzel, where are you?! Oh, my god... _Denzel_!"

There, impaled into the black floor by a splintered board was a charred carcass. Through a lipless, cracked mouth agonised murmurs crept out, drowned out below the ambient rage of the fire. It was a small body; a _child's_ body, which stirred and squirmed in its dying throes like a newborn disturbed in its crib. Although no other would recognise him, Tifa did with an immediate, harrowing swell of horror and grief: it was Denzel, her own adoptive son. Her failure.

 _No, no, no..._

She emerged into the street, the mutilated shadow of her boy cradled in her arms.

 _No, please; not this - not like this, please..._

The upheaval of onlookers meant nothing to her.  
The billowing smoke that eclipsed the moonlight meant nothing to her.

His eyes were still so brilliantly blue, unblinking sapphires immersed within coarse charcoal. She loved those eyes. How often she'd brushed aside his scruffy brown fringe and mothered him about showing them off a little more. _They'd attract all the girls,_ she'd remarked to his embarrassment, insistently combing back the hazel locks while he sulked and blushed away. _Just do something with that damn mop of yours, already. You're as bad as Cloud._

There was one word she could make out.  
One word that brought her to tears.

 _'Mom'._

One word that broke her.

"Stick with me," Tifa whispered plaintively. A thick sob gathered in her throat, "stick with me, Denzel, come on..."

She stroked back the embers of his hair, like she always did.

 _You'd break all the girls' hearts, I told you, but I didn't think mine would be among them._

 _Don't close those eyes, Denzel._  
 _Don't close them, please don't..._


	12. XII: Being and Time

**XII**

* * *

...

[ν] - εγλ 0008, November 28.  
2 years ago.

 _"Why are you bothering to protect the Planet anyway?" Denzel steers a challenging glare up to Tifa, bedridden. "All it does is take away. It doesn't give anything back to us. When's it ever been grateful for anything we've done for it? All it does it hurt me... it's cruel, and I hate it!"_

 _The noxious, oily syrup of the Geostigma meanders down from his hairline, and the barmaid ponders upon his question with a similar pessimism. She deceives him with a smile, although they both appreciate how false it is. They both realise that the Planet is diseased, but not only with this outbreak: i_ _t's been diseased since the inception of the human race._

 _These are ignorant days, long before the truth becomes known to them. They're frightening days. She worries that she might lose him, but she cannot forsake her battle against discomposure. She won't let weakness and suspicion take hold over her - not for Denzel, not for Cloud, and most certainly not for herself._

 _It's endearing how Denzel clams up about his feelings around Cloud, the 'tough, grizzled hero' he aspires to be. When they're alone, only then, does Denzel admit how scared he is. She's been there through the storms of tears and the heated tantrums. She's laughed into her hand when Denzel's deemed her and Cloud 'all right' in his efforts to be just as detached and 'masculine' as his idol. She's even guided and nurtured him through his first crush.  
_

 _Through losing his parents, losing his guardian, losing his friends, losing everything - he doesn't deserve this._ _He's a child.  
He's more than that - he's an angel. He's her angel._

 _"You know," she recounts, settling down on the edge of his bed. "I've been cruel, before. But I'm 'all right', aren't I?"_

 _"No way you've ever been this cruel," Denzel sulks, pulling up the covers._

 _"You wanna bet?" Tifa grins impishly, hoping to buoy his spirits. "Ask Cloud what it's like to get into one of my suplexes."_

 _"I bet he'd kick your ass," the boy snickers. "Cloud's unbeatable!"_

 _"Language, mister!" Tifa scolds, its harsh edges lost beneath her mirth._

 _A moment of silence, and Denzel looks with diffidence towards her._

 _"Am I gonna die?" he asks. The bluntness of it arrests Tifa briefly, and she struggles to come to terms with the notion that this isn't some half-baked, puerile hypothesis out of tiredness or curiosity. This is sincere, rooted within a heart that's been maligned and neglected by the fates of this world. Her chest tightens._

 _"No," she squeezes his foot beneath the blanket affectionately. "No, I won't let you. Okay?"_

 _"Promise?"_

 _(Why don't we make a promise?)_

 _"All right. I promise."_

...

Tifa was alone.

Her boy was asleep now, she assured herself, tucked into an WRO hospital bed. He was cocooned in bandages, restorative concoctions fed into him through cable and drip. Beyond all hope, there was a steady electronic beat from the monitor beside her. The green, digital pulses were frail and almost inaudible, but as Tifa languished there forlorn, it was all she could bear to listen to. The lonely voice of Denzel's heart, and its tenuous safety from the Lifestream's flow.

 _(You've got to keep your promise...)_

 _It's not fair_ , she thought, her emotions scattered. The moment she surrendered to her dejection, the fighter's spirit within her refused to follow, flaring its head. A crestfallen woman became a violent, tempestuous one; she blamed everything and nothing: herself, that man, her absent friends and allies, and even clawed out at incorporeal concepts - _time, luck, vice_ \- just to feel a modicum of vindication. When it didn't arrive, her hollow anger was reduced to cinders of exhaustion and lament. On and on wound the grievous cycle, eating into her with emptiness and guilt, until Tifa tearfully uprooted the bedside table upon its side.

"It's not _fair!_ " she squalled, throat aching with woe and ashes. As it had all those times before, her rage quelled beneath its own aimlessness, lost and wandering back into the familiar realms of despair. She threaded the mussed, dirty curtain of her hair back past her ear, brimstone eyes left bleary and tender.

The door shut behind her, and she flinched around towards the source - the maudlin phantom that was Vincent Valentine.

"Vincent?" Tifa studied him, as though the very essence of trust had been stripped away from her.

"How is he?"

"He's had emergency surgery," Tifa mourned, soullessly rehearsing all she'd heard from the staff. "They found splinters deep inside him, and the burns... oh, Vincent, the _burns_! He had to have blood exchanges, needles sewn through him, and who knows what else! It's like he's just some damn _doll_ they can practise on, and they said," she sniffed, wet with emotion and fatigue. "They said he'll only pull through because of some anomalies inside his body caused by-

 _(It doesn't give anything back)_

-the cells of the stigma that were affected before, but it's still... it's all up to fate now..."

Vincent strafed along the outskirts of the room in reflection, digesting the information. The berth he kept between them suggested that even now, Vincent was wary of physical boundaries. While usually tepid, his tone was coloured with rueful solemnity. "I've come to offer my apologies."

"I thought you might." Ever since that bastard uttered his name, she'd imagined that sooner or later she'd have to confront the gunslinger about the truth. She never condemned Vincent for his actions, though. Not once. It wasn't by his hand, but by the lapse of her own. "I kinda know why, too."

"This is my responsibility," Vincent interrupted. It was a low, beleaguered confession, one which had been reiterated many times over until the words were dust in his mouth. How many _responsibilities_ had he burdened himself with? How often had his acts of penance only been repaid by further ignominy? The weights had been lifted in time, but their impressions were much more demanding to absolve. His path now led him to behold a young boy, mummified from burns.

Tifa scoffed, "this is _your_ responsibility? So, you started the fire? You were there, right, since it's your responsibility?"

"No." Vincent dipped his head in introspection, his lips hidden beneath the high, scarlet collar of his cloak.

"Then don't bull me about _responsibility_ , Vincent! For Gaia's _sake!_ " she hissed, hammering her fist against the wall. "You weren't even in the same _district_ as us! So what, you made a few enemies, and they're sick bags of shit? We _all_ have! We all do, day after day, but you didn't set the bottle on fire; you didn't throw it; you didn't destroy our home _or_ a child's future, did you?! You did _nothing,_ but mope around feeling sorry for yourself! You're not the one suffering - _Denzel_ is! You're not the one at fault, _they_ are! So get your head _out_ of your ass already, and get a grip! Damn it Vincent, we're _friends_ \- you know what that means?!"

 _Not entirely,_ he admitted to himself.

"It means we stand by each other, no matter _what_!" Tears pricked at her eyes, warm and glutted with a frustration and vulnerability that cracked upon the surface despite her attempts to smother them. She was quivering, fitful with culpability for a crime that others had committed. What she portrayed Vincent had seen in himself countless episodes over, and his silence was no longer merely pensive but also sympathetic. Venting emotions was healthy; a step that he had been denied. "So just this _once_ , do me a favour and shut _up_ about _your_ damn guilt! You weren't there; _I_ was! _I_ failed him, all right?! I- I _promised_ him, and I...!

 _(So you did forget.)_

I-..."

"-Broke it," Vincent finished, through understanding. "I made a similar vow myself, years ago. My inaction - or rather, the inadequacy of what actions I _did_ take - resulted in the very world's jeopardy. As an honorary mother to the boy, I can imagine your world too must be suffering from that same sense of jeopardy."

"I don't know why it feels harder now," Tifa inhaled deeply in what self-control she could temper. "I've had my mother taken from me, my father too... I've lost a mentor, a friend, and through every loss I've found the resolve to become stronger and more grateful for what I _do_ have. I'm supposed to be _used_ to dealing with this, it's supposed to be _easier_ on me now! I'm supposed to stronger than I've _ever_ been before and rally myself - ' _fight the good fight'_ , for what _that's_ worth anymore. But I'm _not._ I'm not, Vincent, because I'm sat here, shaking and scared to _hell_ for him...! I mean, what's _wrong_ with me?"

"Only that which you perceive in yourself, unfortunately," surmised the dead man. "If you had truly erred from your promise to him, then you wouldn't be here. While you stay with him, urging and willing him to survive even subliminally by talking about his future... then you are still protecting Denzel from death."

Vincent critically inspected his own view, and wondered whether the same might have applied to his past transgressions. He imagined himself fettered to the madman's slab, listening to the aged wisdom of his present self, uncertain whether he would have accepted his judgment. Words would not have alleviated the memory of Lucrecia, fallen to those virulent alien cells. They would not have undone the birth, nor drained the syringes, nor dampened the gunpowder. For all their dominion over hearts and minds, words possessed a strange ability to be both powerful and impotent simultaneously. Then again, perhaps Tifa was right: introversion was a selfish curse, and the rules of life had changed beyond his own experiences; words clearly mattered to her, and even more so to Yuffie.

"I don't feel like I'm doing an awful lot of protecting." The strength sapped from her bones, the barmaid slumped back into her seat.

"If it's in your nature to protect all the time," Vincent proposed, "then how do you know you've stopped?"

Tifa's smile was faint and melancholy, a courtesy enough to let her companion know his thoughts were appreciated. Keeping herself occupied with conversation, she bundled up fistfuls of Denzel's sheets, kneading at the material in subconscious engagement. "Where's Yuffie?"

"She's drawing up plans with Reeve for tomorrow," the gunslinger said. "She doesn't know about Denzel yet."

"You know, she's really mellowed out since she's been around you more often. You're good influences on each other, I think." Tifa's observation was met by a wall of quiet, inward sangfroid, which she'd interpreted as a level of shyness or unease. He was as closed-off as Cloud was, if not worse, and in her current state she didn't intend on crossing any boundaries. She retreaded her steps, his history of human trust and love a minefield of sensitivity. "Ah, I didn't mean..."

"No," Vincent shook his head in rare humour, soothing Tifa's apprehensions. "I just don't know where you get 'mellow' from, that's all."

The levity left Tifa in a light, knowing snort. It didn't fill the void of Denzel's agony, but it was a much-needed spur of morale. Penniless would be the man who betted against Vincent Valentine's ability to locate his funny bone. Inspired, Tifa sat straight, no longer sagged despondently. "So what's this plan, then?"

"We're staging an execution," he explained. "It's Don Santeo who's behind all of this, and he's twisting the people of the slums against his enemies. In my efforts to detain or destroy him, I was labelled as a monster and reviled by those who live out of his hand." After a pause Vincent revealed, "Reeve will shoot me at eleven o' clock tomorrow morning, silencing their turmoil. At least, that's what they'll believe. But with Reeve-"

"-It'll be a _decoy_ ," Tifa gathered, the warmth returning to her eyes. So there _was_ hope _._ "That's what they're working on?"

"Yeah," Vincent told her. "With a good wind of fortune behind us, we'll undermine the Don's main source of support."

"I really have been out of touch, haven't I?" she realised, nostalgic upon the reminiscence of AVALANCHE and its camaraderie. Now that she'd settled down, fostered children nagging at her skirts, Cloud coming through the Seventh Heaven doors of an evening with his face smoked by travel, she'd nearly forgotten the daunting thrills of adventure. Even now, her knuckles smarted from the rust of her technique. Revenge had brought her into Barret's organisation, had reunited her with Cloud, and had twined them with intimacy; revenge against those who dared to endanger Denzel's life was not such a terrible idea. "Count me in."

"You want to become involved?" Vincent sounded bemused. "Are you sure?"

"I can't exactly go back to being a barmaid so soon, can I?" Tifa gazed over at the burned effigy of her adopted son, rage and sorrow quaking inside her anew. "At least if I'm working together with you all, I'll be able to find the man who did this, and... I'll kill him, Vincent. With my bare hands, I swear I'll _kill_ him!"

"I won't stop you." There was no surprise in the gunman's dead voice. "Did you get a name?"

Of course she did. It was etched into her mind like a hot brand, and her fury even more so, "Owl."

Vincent fell gravely silent. There was no doubt that the Don had violated the Seventh Heaven, who had set loose his rabid hounds upon it. And yet, that name rang coldly and eerily along his spine, like whiplash of from phantoms past. Gooseflesh resurrected feeling to his snowy complexion, but he yearned to be ice once again.

Tifa turned to him, hand furled above her chest. "Thank you, Vincent."

He didn't reply.

"All right, y'all are talkin' _bullshit!"_ the two heard, muffled, through the door. It swung agape on the end of a sturdy leather boot, which belonged to a stalwart, sinewy man in his summer years. His hair was as flaxen as the plumage of a Chocobo, and his grizzled, West-Continent accent was unmistakeable.

" _Cid_!" groaned Yuffie, arms shackled around his left ankle in futile impediment. "Cid, I said not to go _in_! _Ugh,_ you stubborn old grump!"

"Shut yer ass up," the captain of the _Shera_ groused, shambling into the room. "I got tired'a waitin' the second I had to use a goddamn _flask_!"

"Yo, what's wrong with you?" Barret griped in scathing baritone. "Manners of a fuckin' horse. Have some respect!"

"You can suck a fat one too, I'm tryin'a do a nice thing here!" Cid Highwind grumbled over his shoulder, rubbing at the shaggy back of his head.

"Cid? Barret?" Overcome, Tifa backed her calves up against the edge of the bed. " _Yuffie_! What are you guys-"

"You're kiddin', right?" Cid patted the crumpled blankets. "We came to see the lil' one. And Denzel, too, 'course, heh."

" _Translation_ ," Yuffie chimed in, "we're all here for you, Tifa! You think you have to face this alone? Think again!"

"Yeah, what you talkin' about? Denzel ain't jus' your kid! Have some damn sense, woman - he's all'a ours!" Barret roamed over the sight of the poor boy, and through an intractable armour of thick muscle, his abundant heart recoiled with the same wilted, wounded parental impulses as the barmaid's. " _Shit_. Lookin' at what those assholes did, it... it just makes my blood boil up, damn...! If that was Marlene, I... I'd...!"

"Through all we on this Planet have endured together," Nanaki contemplated aloud, padding in behind. His ember-steeped tail lulled behind, tapering in his wake a bouquet of fiery stardust. "To think that there are still those who remain so incorrigible is not only a severe insult to us all, but also truly saddening..."

"I ain't sad, I'm _pissed off_!" Barret barked through tear-glossed eyes. The others weren't convinced. "He's just a kid, aw'right? Quit givin' me those looks!"

Through their commotion, Tifa searched the doorway for signs of the last light. Past Barret's shoulder she peered, toes pointed, an eager sensation flushing through her that hadn't surfaced since over a year ago. Maybe this once, her spiky-haired delivery boy and all-around catastrophe would have listened to one of her voicemails. It would have been a wicked turn of events if these past ten minutes had kindled a hope in her that was extinguished by the one who had, over time, come to embody that very aspect for her. She waited for him. She waited on his promise, as Denzel waited out on hers.

 _(After all...)_

Footfalls clove through the disturbance, firm and resolute.  
Her eyes met with her hero's, and his met with hers.

 _(...I promised.)_

Cloud Strife, even after all this time, hadn't forgotten.

* * *

 **A/N:** Thanks for anyone who has kept with this story, and anyone new who has read up to this point (even if it's a brief, curious browse through)! I realise that this chapter was quite dialogue/character-heavy, but I felt that the circumstances called for it; the next chapter will be more action-involved! Find out if Denzel survives his treatment, and what happens during Vincent's mock execution - again, every view counts (almost to _1,000_ now) - your support means everything to this story!


	13. XIII: Journey to Janus

**XIII**

* * *

It was the day that Vincent Valentine died.

The morning wind was crisp, blustering through Edge with hostility. Above, faceless clouds coalesced together into a gloomy mercury pall that some of the more superstitious of the convoy took to be an ill omen; the Planet's displeasure towards their mockery of death. Vincent, by contrast, had for a long time stolen mortality from the world with his own existence and thought little of it. He travelled there, stowed away in secret, to observe the turn of the tides himself.

To protect their identities and name, and most importantly to be there for Denzel, the other party members had remained with the boy.  
Out of sight, out of blame, and out of danger. All except the doomed, proud man who refused to see this finished through another's eyes.

The route was rough and uneven, the truck's worn rubber tracks and aged, convulsing engine giving those in the rear of the vehicle a dose of seasickness. For that reason the journey was silent, and each of the WRO soldiers flanking the condemned stared down between their feet in concentration, repelling the nausea. Except the lack of red knitted into the breast of their tawny-stone jackets, Vincent couldn't truly distinguish the military from nurse Evie's own apparel. However, it wasn't their uniformity that brought disquiet to his thoughts. It was that which sat opposite to him in a bizarre mirror image. There, emulating him in all posture, appearance and even mood, was a living duplicate of himself puppeteered from within by Reeve's very own Cait Sith.

' _Failsafes_ ,' Reeve had referred to the dangling, stiff marionettes as. Likenesses of each and every one of the party were hung by hooks, like butchered carrion, inside a secure chamber that both Vincent and Yuffie had been exposed to the previous night. ' _For emergency situations, just like this.'_

' _Disturbed_ ,' Vincent had replied.

Two horns bleated from behind the truck. Once short, followed a long drone, ended by a second brief blare. They were entirely in tandem with each other. The WRO soldier to Vincent's right pressed a hand to the tense gunslinger's shoulder and urged him to remain unseen, leaning up out of their seat to peel back the green tarpaulin. Looking through it, he spied two antiquated cars trailing the vehicle with the sinister meander of a predator's dorsal fin. They were neither leisurely nor belligerent, but their presence sowed disquiet within the soldier, as if they were only there to convey a message: _we know._

"Two cars," he reported. Rust had mottled over them like lichen. "They look old - _really_ old. Skeleton cars, y'know?"

 _The Don_ , Vincent deduced.

"There's two more," the soldier added uneasily. Pulling out of the alleyways on either side, as their pursuers passed, was a second couple of aged cars proclaiming another three horn-blasts - two quicker, bracketing a single drawn-out note just as before. A dryness lurked within the sounds, hoarse with dust and age and neglect, as solemn as the knells of a church. It piqued Vincent's intrigue, but he contained himself. After not half a minute's pause, what was becoming a chilling indication of Don Santeo's insight into their plans announced itself with the three-stop clamour of a fifth and sixth cars' horns pulling out concurrently into the inauspicious columns behind the five-truck WRO convoy. "That's creepy, man. You think there's someone on the inside?" The soldier was nonplussed, his brow creased; the other, to Vincent's left, was completely silent. There wasn't a word from them, and they radiated nervous tension. The man sniffed.

"It's possible," proposed Vincent. "But we don't have time to suspect everyone. Santeo's in such a position where he can neither object to, nor prevent what we intend to do - regardless of any prior intelligence." There was a metallic click on his left, stirring his ears. A handgun's safety, thumbed off. "Unless..."

Vincent barred his forearm into the muzzle of the weapon beside him, and pushed it off-target. The gun unloaded its fatal shot through the flapping material shroud over the truck's rear, the bullet blunted into the wall of a passing building outside. Vincent's ear was aflame with noise, the ringing cacophonous and persistent. The traitor's face was glossed with sweat, a portrait of anxiety that belied his murderous intent. The gunslinger latched around the barrel of the handgun, which regurgitated smoke, and tugged it free of quivering, perspiration-slicked hands. The would-be assassin was cornered, stammering in almost as much discomfort as Vincent's off-putting copy was now in. Cait Sith quailed with surprise, painting an unflattering look to the doppelgänger.

"...He tried to get there first."

"Wait," the soldier said, stumbling ponderously inside the moving vehicle. He trained his rifle onto the collaborator with a confounded expression, one of betrayal. "Toba's not one of the Don's guys. I've been with him since the beginning; he's got a damn family! Shit. You being blackmailed?"

"I- I have to be the one to shoot him," Toba stuttered. He was wracked with fear, unlike the rabid detainees of Grimhaven Vincent was familiar with. "I have to... I've gotta _kill_ him, I don't have a choice, Crado! My fiancée," he swallowed, groping feebly for the weapon, "m-my fiancée... Oh Gaia, he's got _Lexi_ , man!"

"That _prick_ ," Crado spat. "Look, he's not gonna touch her. You know what she's like," he slapped Toba's shoulder with an unsettled spur of humour, one which was entirely amiss with the panic-stricken man. "C'mon, she's tough. Remember when you first asked her on a date? She slapped you so _hard_!"

"I don't _care_ ," Toba gave back, as if talking to a stranger. "I don't- I don't care about that! I can't take the risk! I can't... I can't let them do that to her, okay? I just can't!" With his second miss of the handgun, which Vincent tilted just out of range, he cried out in both frustration and hysteria. "This guy... this guy's got _nobody_! No-one even knows his fucking _name_! _Please_ , man! Please, let me see her home safely, all right? All right? _Please_!"

When manipulated, love was as perilous as hatred, if not more so. Vincent knew first-hand. The desolation he'd suffered upon the reprehensible acts of that accursed scientist and his former, wayward lover was evidence enough of this. The very fact that he was alive in this generation alone was because he had loved too openly, that he had exposed his candour to the taste of Hojo's bullet and Lucrecia's abandon. His heart would never again reside upon his sleeve, that much he had promised himself, never requiting the tangible and youthful warmth of one in particular he did so lament his wonders of. The cesspit of emotions that he had repressed or shunned altogether was stinging and splitting open at the sight of this enamoured man and the life that Vincent could never have himself.

There was civil war within his own mind.  
The stoic, pragmatic ice of the dead man was thawing under the memories of what it was to be alive.

He cast his gaze down upon the babbling Toba, and down towards the handgun he wielded. With one decision, he had the ability to rob this man of all he cherished and adored. With that couple's life in pieces, the WRO could then manoeuvre against this underground empire yet not without blood upon their hands, nor guilt upon his. The pressure of a needle, in certain places of the body, was far more agonising than the press of a razor's edge in another. The truth would be known intimately by him alone. If he turned the firearm upon himself, then he invited the slow, toxic doubt of whether the Don had the capacity to honour his word even if this man did comply. Crado too appeared to be considering the same dangerous line of thoughts, flitting his attention between Vincent and Toba.

A moral roadblock: precisely what the Don wanted.

"This _is_ a problem," Cait Sith sighed with loud resignation. "And just when I was starting to like being you, too!"

"Boss?" Crado gestured towards the peculiar puppet. "What are you talking about?"

"Seems like you lads need a break," the faux Vincent shrugged. How surreal it was for Vincent to view himself in such a cheery disposition. "I'm all due to die today, so don't worry about a thing, all right? Now, listen up - there's a blood packet stashed up here," Cait Sith rapped at his forehead. "This was where I- Reeve, was going to shoot me. Extremely dependable, and just as realistic! All you've got to do is just point, shoot, and carry me to the Don! Nae bother!"

"What if he sees through it?" Toba pointed out.

"Then Lady Luck's bade her fond farewells," Cait Sith declared, with macabre levity. "You haven't really got a choice though, have you?"

"He's not wrong," Crado offered unhelpfully. "You better take this chance."

A heavier horn bellowed out across the road, and Crado peered through the tarpaulin sheet. Behind the six-car tail was a veritable fortress of a vehicle, clad in the scavenged hides of multiple others. Their cadavers were soldered together to form a towering, misshapen mutant of an engine, rumbling forth on colossal crenellated wheels that threatened to annihilate even the military's trucks upon overshadowing them. No doubt this was Don Santeo's luxurious personal craft.

"Wh-what is that?" Toba rose to his feet timidly, but Vincent palmed him back onto the bench.

"We gotta shoot you in the head?" Crado asked the puppet, stress branching out in a vein beside his eye.

"You don't _have_ to," Cait Sith replied. "It'd help, though."

The reins were Crado's own, and through haste he levered his rifle upward and punctured open Cait Sith's skull. The spray of pseudo-blood spattered across the three, stippling them with the deep maroon spume. The entrance wound brooked thick and abundant, pumping free through manufactured flesh. Vincent's double slumped bonelessly against the seat, the expression measured perfectly the subtle human shock that had struck Vincent's own features by Hojo's hand. If anything however it was liberating, and the gunslinger was oddly unfazed by the sight of it; he considered that he had become desensitised to death, having embraced it so personally, but the voice of that waggish young fool from Wutai echoed inside him that he was simply _moving on_.

"All right," Crado growled to his friend, and hooked him by the nape of his neck like a lion to its cub over to himself. Blood continued to drip and murmur onto the floor, swilling around underfoot with each tremor the streets brought. "Follow him out, now, and run for your fucking _life_. Gaia help you, Toba - _go_."

Toba hoisted the corpse up onto his shoulder, ichor ebbing down over his jacket. Despite its size, it was fairly light; he would have to act. He stumbled out of the truck, ankle buckling against the solid tarmac. He fell onto the puppet, careful not to mangle it further, when the fender of a car loomed before him. His eyes welded shut, his brow furrowed with anticipation, and he braced himself on to the end, sheltering the false being as though it were his own son.

The metal bow brushed against Toba's head, as close as a kiss.  
He breathed out, long, and ragged and relieved.

Ahead, the WRO convoy had stopped. There was a clangour from either side as both WRO personnel and riders of the chariots of rust disembarked. The six cars fanned out into a fortified half-hexagon in the road, barricading off the southern end of the onlookers. The truck drivers interpreted this as an invitation, and branched out symmetrically. Grimhaven residents caught within the no-man's land were shepherded over and under the stationary vehicles, crawling and clambering their ways to the relative safety of the thronging hordes. Above their excited chatter, mercenaries and soldiers confronted one another, man to man.

Out of the large, vehicular zombie hobbled Don Santeo, sluggish and hooded by a cloth shawl. No longer was he sporting his lurid set of armour, but he was now dressed in a kingly robe composed of enough fabric to tether to a ship's mast. Hidden away within them were steel spokes at his hip, which clanked and rapped against his tortured belt-line; whatever it was jutted out at his waist, removing his human guise altogether. Sporadic cheers elicited from the people, who marvelled upon him even as he hauled along a clubbed foot that had malformed and bloated to obscene ugliness overnight. The extremity was bulbous and folded in places like congealed liquid, its flesh pale with the texture of a marshland. Its toes were scabbed with gangrene and forked out unnaturally like plant roots. He hugged his broken arm close to his body, and still nursed it inside a cast. His gait was cumbersome and awkward, and his lungs struggled beneath the ample weight of his breasts.

"Well," Reeve called out, strolling through the palpable friction. "Seems like you got what you wanted. Are you happy?"

"Generally, yes," the Don grinned, his lips like mucous leeches. "About having to come outside? No, no I'm not," his humour was soured, and he glanced over the puppet's remains with disdain. "But the Red Ripper, soaked in red! The irony. Haw-haw! I'm going to use his head as a dip bowl!"

 _'Rip off his head,'_ bawled a man from behind the vehicular bulwark. ' _My son's not slept all night because of that freak!'_

"I did it, all right? I did it! _Look_!" Toba spoke up, pushing himself to his feet. "Where's my fiancée? Where's Lexi?! Give her back to me!"

"Lexi," Santeo mumbled to himself. "Lexi, Lexi... I _think_ I remember her, yes - but, mm... where's the _proof_ you killed him?"

"What?" the soldier was dumbfounded, if reeling with fear. "His body's right there! Right in front of your damn eyes, now give her _back_ to me!"

"Gut it," ordered the Don firmly, his ever-winking eye riddled with suspicion. "I heard a lot of whispers when my weeds were at play. Gut him."

 _It's over,_ Toba thought in terror, the spotlight enough to quail his spirit. He wasn't a killer, let alone a battle-toughened warrior. He hadn't even the true conviction to squeeze the trigger on Vincent, either, but the collision of the gunslinger's forearm had startled him. Toba had grown up in Kalm, and was every part the town's namesake - humble and traditional, with not an ounce of flair or ambition in him. When he'd volunteered for the WRO, he had spent most of his days aiding in the construction of the Edge highway, or performing maintenance works. Until today he'd wielded a weapon three times: once in training, once as part of the infamous sewer evacuation disaster last March, and the last time because a cementing saw was technically registered as a sidearm in law. When all eyes were upon him to kneel down and drive a knife into the chest cavity of the puppet, he regressed into that helpless, scared boy from Kalm.

 _It's over - shit, he's going to find out. He's going to make me into a liar.  
He's going to hurt Lexi, or worse - he's going to do what he always does to his women.  
He's going to kill me. He's going to make me watch, then kill me here. I can't stomach this - I can't do this, I didn't want any of this!_

 _I want to go home - I want to go home with my Lexi, and we can live on together. I want her.  
I want to see her, and I want her safe, and in my arms - that's all I want! I don't deserve this!_

"Not _hiding_ anything, are you?" the Don mused. "Hurry up!"

"He doesn't have to do that." The Commissioner addressed the both of them, reassuring Toba. "Don't demean the dead. We've delivered what the people want, and whatever sick business between you both is finished here as well." Urgency littered his tone. "Give the man his fiancée back, Santeo."

"Yes he _does_ ," the Don wheezed in affront. "Trying to deny me my prize, eh? Open his belly, let's get a good look at him!"

Toba hovered the knife-edge over the simulacrum's torso, but when he pricked the soft faux-skin underneath, he hesitated. The pressure mounted, and his muscles petrified. His body stiffened, an animal caught in the glow of headlights. His breath came slow and hampered, as if the air that flowed from his nostrils were signs of his deception. He readjusted his grip on the hilt, his fingers slick and unable to fasten around it. _They're going to kill me,_ was all that encroached upon him as he took longer and longer, his blade poised, the death of time ticking by. _They're going to take my Lexi, and they're going to hurt her..._

"Oh," snorted the Don, "what's a little joke between men? Get up, lad, get up! I believe you!"

 _'The Don's so funny!'_ hailed a woman from the crowd.

' _Yeah, can't you see he was joking?'_ jeered a man, his four-year old daughter astride his shoulders. _'The Don would never do something like that!'_

' _Look at all these bastards_ ,' protested another, _'trying to make our Don out to be a monster!'_

"You do?" Toba scoped over the mob furtively, afraid and untrusting. "Where is she, then? Give her back to me!"

The Don nodded in acceptance, his sordid mouth pursed. He lumbered back towards his monstrous craft, the atmosphere thick with the soldier's worry. Toba couldn't blink, for fear of missing his fiancée's safe return. The door thumped shut, the reverberations felt in his heart. He flinched from it. The car's suspension hissed and steamed, a great hydraulic hive beneath the chassis, elevating it higher above the little people. From its lofty perch, the vehicle's hood lurched open.

Toba was terrified. " _Where_ -" was all he managed to croak out.

"YOU'RE A LIAR," resonated the scrambled audio of a loudspeaker. "HE'S A _LIAR_ , EVERYONE! HE _LIED_ TO US! THEY _ALL_ DID!"

At that, within the back of the truck, Vincent jarred as if freshly woken.

Hordes of disparagement and abuse volleyed out towards the WRO, the civilians stimulated and riotous. They hung on their Don's every word, transfixed by him into some cultic reverence, and Reeve knew that the temperature of the situation was escalating out of hand. The WRO founder steadily paved his own way back through the soldiers, one arm slung under Toba's in forced rout. The soldier threshed and struggled, screaming out for his fiancée, for his unseen love.

"All parties back to your vehicles," Reeve instructed, as evenly as he could. " _Now_!"  
The enflamed mob hemmed in the convoy on all sides.

"GET THEM!" the Don boomed out over the swelling pandemonium, "THEY'RE PROTECTING THE RED RIPPER! THE LIARS WANT US ALL DEAD! THEY WANT TO SEE HIM PULL YOUR CHILDREN APART, YOUR LOVED ONES, AND WHY? BECAUSE THEY WANT TO RAZE GRIMHAVEN TO THE GROUND, AND BURN IT ALL! THEY WANT EVERYTHING GONE FROM HERE! THEY WANT TO BUILD ANOTHER SHINRA TOWER, RIGHT HERE OVER YOUR GRAVES! YOUR CHILDREN'S GRAVES!"

" _Enough_!" Reeve yelled out over the chaos, climbing up the scaffolding of the rearmost truck. It was daunting, the platform as high as the stakes. So many hateful eyes pierced up into him. So much incessant, wild emotion. _Would reason suffice?_ "Enough, damn it! Aren't you all tired of this scare-mongering? The Red Ripper is a man who's trying to _save_ you people, just like we are! Just like everyone else but your Don is, but you're too stupid to realise it! Are all of you brainwashed? Or are you all just brain- _dead_? You know what your Red Ripper was doing, forty-eight hours ago? He was freeing daughters, mothers, sisters... He was freeing your women, women from every corner of the continent, from living in the squalor of human traffic and slavery! _That's_ what your Don is! That's-"

With a harrowing crackle, bullets sang out the dirge of Reeve Tuesti.  
In the wake of the truth the crowd hushed, forsaken by their beloved Don.

* * *

 **A/N:** Sorry for the late(ish) delivery! I know I'm a little out of sync with my usual upload times, but writer's block has been a nightmare. I had a brutal time with this chapter, for some reason. I hope you enjoy, and thank you for any views/feedback as ever!


	14. XIV: Flatline

**XIV**

* * *

Reeve retched, the canvas of his back bespangled with holes.

He stepped forward once, twice, ungainly and dreamlike. On the second, his foot slipped on the truck's metal ribcage. He collapsed, his upper arm wedged hard between his weight and the vehicle, even dislocated at the socket, but his nerves already burned and screamed. It didn't matter. Gravity took its course, and the Commissioner rebounded off the skeletal structure, plummeting onto the roadside. The dull crumpling of bones was muffled beneath heaped, unmoving flesh.

"ALL LIARS SUFFER THE SAME!" warned Santeo over the loudspeaker, "TRUST IN YOUR DON! TRUST IN YOUR SAVIOUR!"

" _No_!" roared Toba, shoving aside the mercenary who had so viciously mown down Reeve, who sneered at his distress. "You _knew_ something would happen! You knew, so you brought her with you! She's up there, isn't she?" The soldier called up to the stilted abomination of a car; "Lexi - Lexi, sweetheart, if you can hear me, I love you! Okay? I love you, and I'm gonna get you back! You're gonna be safe, honey, I promise!"

' _Don't you threaten the Don, you lying asshole!_ ' a voice emerged from the bristling crowd.

' _Are you deaf?!_ _The Don's stolen his fiancée, you fuckin' idiot!'_ Toba's defender muscled a palm into the other, and a brawl ignited around them. ' _You think a guy who shoots someone in cold blood like that has any right to call the shots around here any more? The Don can kiss my ass, and so can you for believing him!'_

The blindly adoring and broken combatted against the enlightened, the streets marbled with the injured. The tumult of a dozen conflicting arguments, of social apostasy and liberation erupted like a plague there in the bowels of Grimhaven. People were hungry, bewildered and scared, resorting to their baser instincts to resolve their differences. The WRO soldiers sallied from the trucks in force, their spirits rekindled in the aftermath of their founder's death, harrying and butting the rowdy scattering of civilians away from one another. Insults as caustic as poison lanced from one edge of the melée to the other, cutting deeper and more personal with each renewed bout of indignation. Meanwhile, the mercenaries - each bought from families just like the people absorbed in violence now - were equally as torn. Some threw down their firearms in surrender and disgust, while others feuded over petty principles down the sights of their weapons, the more tempestuous among them rattling off clips into their former comrades. It was the nadir of mankind; a sickening carnage of animals in human skins.

"STOP IT!" the Don shrieked, a child in his high chair between bickering parents. " _STOP IT!_ "

"I'll be there, Lexi! I'm coming, all right?" Toba elbowed through the fracas, "I'm your hero, remember?"

"Shut _up_ ," Reeve's killer complained, bursting open Toba's skull with an abrupt gunshot. A bloody spindrift whipped up from the exit wound, showering a thick brume of cerebrospinal fluid across a car's hood. The wafts of smoke hadn't cooled before two bullets studded the dome of his head, snapping it forward. The light of cruelty and derision lingered in his eyes long after all mortal thoughts had flown from him, just another nameless victim strewn upon Grimhaven's soil.

Crado lowered his vengeful sight and paced through the anarchy. Buffeted by adrift and haphazard limbs, he inched closer towards his fallen friend, towards Toba and the Don's mechanical monster. He was two yards from reaching him when a bar of iron lashed out and clubbed him hard across the occipital ridge, the rear of his crown flaring with a thick, purple contusion. With one more step Crado buckled, poorly weathering the spell of dizziness, the world around him a blurred, reddened nightmare of muddled acoustics. Everything was murky. He stretched out his arm, crawling towards the two carcasses, but a boot trampled down onto him and severed the final remnants of strength left in him. The stampede was brutal - heels knocking ignorantly against his temple; boots scuffing and chafing, twisting and crushing; the full weights of grown men pulverising the life from him.

Pooling from the WRO convoy was a nebulous, crimson shade. Vincent Valentine's wrath seeped through the battle-ravaged landscape, blown forth like an arctic wind. He carried upon his frayed wings the same eldritch scourge as Grimhaven's witch-hunts had foretold, in callous footfalls that woke silence and dismay. ' _That's him!'_ he heard some yell, ' _he's the reason we're all here in the first place!',_ and another; ' _murderer!_ ' A handful ardently protected him, prying themselves away from the bestial images on the posters, or the otherworldly menace to their families' lives that they simply did not witness here in this man. He'd never been supported before. It was a surreal experience, one compounded by his natural penchant for distrust and individuality, yet onward he stalked in spite. Reeve's body lay behind him, then he treaded over Crado's remains. The murderer of two was next, then tragic Toba. Vincent unleashed Cerberus, and angling it skyward, summoned its cry. The resonant buckshot gored through the engine compartment of the Don's transport, cresting into a black fountain of debris.

"Get out of here," the Don barked. "Reverse, you idiot! _Go_!"

"But sir," his driver turned to him, "there's _people_ down there! _Your_ people! We'll run them all down!"

The Don snarled, slanting Yuffie's shuriken across the man's throat. His piggish eyes glinted with venom and cowardice, and he was starting to sweat rather profusely. It gathered in the hollow of his back, his skin sticking to his clothes. "I don't care if you squeezed them into the tank for fuel! Get out of here, _now_!"

With bronze liquid drooling from its engine, the car's immense wheels listed back. They seemed immoveable at first, their mountainous rubber enamel revolving as though made from stone. The backward acceleration was unprecedented, and with a sudden surge, it began to steer away from Vincent, from the conflict, away from all of the Don's responsibilities. The vehicle lurched up as its reckless retreat claimed another life, the suspension squealing and righting over the indiscriminate bumps of those poor souls packed around it. Vincent regarded the massacre with a grim temper - the snapping of bones like twigs, the mashed organs vomited up through rictuses of terror only exacerbating the Don's ultimate fate by the gunslinger's hand. With another gunshot, the roar of Cerberus streaked across the hood, denting its left half askew. A bullet speared through the windscreen, the shattering of glass eliciting a fierce curse from the driver.

Vincent hunted after it ruthlessly, pushing himself at a pace that excelled human limits.

"He's still coming," the driver reported, unnerved. "He's not slowing down!"

"Put your _foot_ down, damn it!" Santeo bawled, slobbering down his chins, "I want that walking _corpse_ left behind!"

As if in answer, Vincent trained the mouths of Cerberus towards a rear axle. His arm ached, the muscles and fibres seething from the constant recoil, yet he persevered on, panting, his eyes lit without mercy. He drew the trigger flat, the sinew of his wrist pulsing. The barrels' howl sundered the axle, the alloy tendon whistling, sparking in burnt twain. The wheel veered away, the momentum of the car hinging it around sharply upon its back-left bearing. With a haunting final groan, the car's mighty weight buckled without its foundation and capsized onto its side like a creature from the skies brought back to the earth.

Vincent mounted the felled vehicle in a sprightly leap, and knelt upon its door. The metal was wrinkled from the impact, and beneath the distant bedlam there was a steady cascade of motor oil and coolant puddling underneath the craft. When he studied the insides of the wreckage, Vincent noted the slumped shadow of the driver pocked with tears of glass. He was motionless, and the dead man presumed him to have joined him.

Lolled out across the back row of seats, in a most unbecoming sprawl of unctuous meat, was Don Santeo himself. A stake of Yuffie's shuriken was nailed through his clavicle, rooted into a bulb of fat that seemed to suck the metal deeper into itself; gluttonous even in the throes of death. His gut shivered spasmodically.

Upon closer inspection, the gunslinger discovered that the Don was weeping. Instead of his unpleasant squint, the swine's glistening eyes were ballooned out of their sockets, searching for the friends and family who had long since abandoned his sick cause. Alone he blubbered, conscious only through the pinches of agony that lit up his nerves. He regurgitated blood in a raucous sputter, drooling scarlet runnels over his flesh. He was visibly cloying, his pigment sallow and curdled. When those watery eyes met Vincent's, the Red Ripper fulfilled the people's paranoid whispers. He levelled Cerberus with the Don's pleading, puce face, offered no condolences, and rendered the slum tyrant's reign at an end. A lone gunshot crackled throughout the gloomy sky; a death sentence.

It was difficult to console, or at the very least apprehend the nihility that entered Vincent's heart upon the execution. Despite a murmur of catharsis, there truly was nothing. There was no sense of elation, or relief, or justice, or even vindication. He hung above the ruins, as cold as the grave he'd filled.

Days of torment over _this_.  
Tears of dear companions and cherished ones shed over _this_.

 _Was it worth it?  
Was any of their suffering worth this?_

 _And that shuriken... there were no doubts to whom it belonged._

There was no rise in his heart. The _thing_ putrefying within the car beneath him deserved this, and by all rights Vincent should have felt something. He was owed that much. However, his thoughts turned to the bloodstained shuriken, and what had been one answer bred only another question, another doubt and insecurity. There was no rest to this cycle, no matter how distorted or abortive the spokes of it were; he deemed it unfair, but his judgments had been unsound before.

Profoundly so, in his experience.  
 _Mortally_ so.

Having retrieved the weapon with a firm, wet wrench, Vincent was assailed by a familiar twittering.

"Whoa, Vinnie!" Yuffie called out from the rooftop above, "you _really_ don't mess around, do ya? You didn't even leave anything for little old me!" She leaned closer over the edge, reviewing the amorphous sludge left of the Don. "Damn. Didn't leave anythin' _period_ , huh? Who'd have thought you'd be my _hero_?"

 _She didn't have a clue._

He did not share her high spirits, nor her willingness to talk. Vincent stared towards her, a petite silhouette against a wintry-slate backdrop.  
'Hero' didn't settle well with him.

"Hey, I'm _kidding_ ," the girl recovered from her swoon; an act. "C'mon, lighten up! You just made the world a better place, what's wrong with a smile?"

When he finally gathered the breath to reply, dregs of the mob and other curious Grimhaven inhabitants branched around the bend towards the two. They'd been drawn by the histrionic topple of the car - they were fireflies converging around a funeral pyre, doing so only out of intuition and nature, not concern. With a glance Vincent vaulted high over Yuffie, soundless save for the flutter of his cloak. Her shuriken rattled onto the rooftop between them, which she plucked up.

"We go," he bid, and without a chance of recuperation or clarity, he pressed off away across the district's skyline.

"Wait up!" Yuffie yelled, albeit resigned towards Vincent's typical attitude. "HQ's in the _other_ direction, dumb-ass!"

Their expedition took them outside the borders of Grimhaven, evading a leering Shinra News helicopter, and the pugnacious cancer entangling the district. Yuffie scrambled up threaded girders that fortified a tall construction site, overlooking the western fringes of the city. She hauled herself up onto the eighth floor, panting from the exertion, and internally tormenting herself over her recent lack of exercise. She wasn't going to remain a young woman forever - fit and beautiful, perhaps, but her ages were fleeting. She'd first met him when she was all of sixteen, fresh-faced, hyperactive and disobedient, and now at nineteen she was already feeling the strains of time. As she lifted herself to her feet, she noticed that these strains had worn similarly across Vincent's features: stern, yielded to the weights and responsibilities of maturity, and so utterly _humourless_. It was her mission to fill those eyes with the light she knew he'd once had.

"So, what's with the-"

"Reeve is dead," Vincent revealed, in deep sobriety.

"... _Huh_?" All the colour to her washed out, both across ashen skin and from her heart. Reeve had all but adopted her, and nursed her from the rebellious nuisance that she'd once been into a semblance of adulthood she bore now. Her chest ached. Her nerves flushed numb, and her mouth dried up. ' _Don't cry,'_ she forced into herself, stamping one foot with frustration onto the concrete. She ignored the emotional swell in her throat. ' _Don't let him see you cry again.'_ Anyone else and she'd have laughed and punched their arm, beaten at them until they'd succumbed and unveiled some sort of disgusting joke. Anyone else but him.

"I'm sorry," he told her. "The execution was a failure. He died protecting my name, instead of removing it. For all of his past duplicities, one can't help but imagine that using his final breath to champion the truth was an act of redemption. I'm not sure how I feel about that."

"Why here?" Yuffie's voice cracked, but she resisted. She always resisted. "Why'd you drag me halfway across town just to say _that_?"

"You needed privacy," Vincent offered, unconvinced even by himself. "I-"

" _Bullshit_!" Her knuckles cracked. Her fingernails ate into her palms, scratching and raking away. _Don't cry._ "I'm not some stupid kid, all right? So stop treating me like one, and _spit it out_! The hospital was closer, so _what_ aren't you telling me?" and again, with wounded passion, "what are you _hiding_ , Vincent?!"

"If you want to speak honestly, then practise it yourself." His attention drifted towards the shuriken slung upon her back. "Why did I find that in his possession?"

"Because he _took_ it from me, okay?" Yuffie snapped, hurt, a knee-jerk reaction against his suspicion. " _Yesterday_ , when you left me after I _told_ you _not_ to!"

It was an uncomfortable, even excruciating issue to raise, but it had gnawed away at him since he first caught sight of it. The weapon glistened there like some macabre trophy, a lasting gloat with which Santeo could mock Vincent from beyond the Lifestream. For years his heart had been decrepit and rotten, empty of all but self-torture, yet now it palpitated with a fervent rhythm. Why in _Gaia_ did this pompous little imp from Wutai alone agitate it like this?

"...And that was _all_ he took?"

Yuffie thrust her fist into him with all her sweltering emotions behind it, throwing him onto the floor. The sodden crunch of his nose didn't satisfy her. The hot thrums of her knuckles didn't, either. The Leviathan of her family had awoken inside her, and it could not be sated. Only then, in her outrage, did one of her obstinate tears streak down her cheek - a sluice of raw, naked feelings. She'd exhausted her very humanity and soul with that blow. "How... _dare_ you!"

Vincent dabbed at the red flow from his nostril, gazing up towards those betrayed eyes. "The reason I brought you here," he began, "is that-..."

" _Forget_ it!" Yuffie stormed away towards the city, grieving and faithless. "If you always wanna be so damn miserable, then go ahead and live in the past! Just remember who wasn't there _in_ it!"

 _...Is that Denzel won't survive the night,_ he explained to the wind.


	15. XV: All in Threes

**XV**

* * *

Below the blasted Midgar wasteland, an alarm wailed.

 _(ALERT. ALERT. ALERT.)_

"What's going on?" roared Hawk, bathed in the fluctuating crimson glow of the Mako facility's emergency state. To his left, a monitor was bestrewn with bold warning flashes, and a flock of three technicians were in uproar and bewilderment beneath it. The screen depicted a refinery arm, but there were no discernible malfunctions. The message was entirely different this time, scrambled, and in all his experience, Hawk had never once witnessed this infernal droning.

 _(ALERT.)_

"It's refinery arm eight, sir," one of the technicians reported. The panic was tangible, even contagious. Adjusting the frame of his glasses, the man scoured over the lengths of intricate and superfluous coding that only he - a former Shinra employee - could hope to translate. "It says the Mako's contaminated!"

Hawk's brow creased, both displeased yet intrigued. "Contaminated with _what_?"

"I-I don't _know_!" The other man scrutinised the figures, which had been layered and protected into esoteric nonsense. The company's infamous, paranoid secret-keeping compulsions had been the subject of many news articles since its demise, but even in the public domain there were few who possessed the background or technological savvy to understand this particular sequence. The technician winced, redoubling his efforts. "It's all gibberish! We've never had this happen!"

"Well, you have now," Hawk was brusque. "So get on it. Shut down all functions on refinery arm eight; _freeze_ it! I want to know _what's_ gotten in there! I want to know _how_ it's gotten in there! Anyone who comes to me without some idea or solution by the hour gets their asses dropped into the Lifestream!"

 _(ALERT.)_

"It's not just number eight, sir," a technician from the overseer's right added in. His monitor was running haywire with alien statistics, in mimicry of the other. "It's inside refinery arm _one_ , as well!"

 _(ALERT.)_

"Contamination in arms seven and six, over here!"

 _(ALERT_.)

"Same message in arms two and three, sir!"

"What the _fuck_ is going on?!" Hawk marched between the frenzied screens, inspecting each of them with growing apprehension. His footfalls landed harder, striking against the mesh grating as a squall of frustration blustered torrid within him. These were among the best scientific minds that black-market payments could muster, and among them there wasn't a _single_ answer? It was unbelievable. When he received word that _all_ _eight_ of the refinery arms were in disarray with this mysterious contamination, and the processes of all eight were subsequently killed for security measures, he nearly drove his fist through a computer.

The alarm sang its fretful chorus, on and on.

 _(ALERT. ALERT. ALERT.)_

"I think I know why we're not having any luck decrypting these codes," posited a technician. He was staring intently towards the pixels, which had once cleanly surveyed refinery arm one of the Mako mine. "I don't think it's a code at all... it- it's a whole other _language_!"

"Huh. Well, it's not Old Wutai, that's for sure." Hawk peered towards the text, plying his temples for thought. The likelihood of that had cornered perhaps at least a few examples, which managed to simmer him down. It didn't remove the gruff, insensitive gravel from his voice, though. "What else is there, the north?"

"There's been two different dialects for the Iciclan people," mused the other, "high and traditional. The first came from the continent's secession from the Dominion a thousand years ago, and the other after the Schism Event five hundred years after that. This is older than _both_ of them, even _combining_ their ages!"

"Wait, I think I recognise this symbol!" one of the scientists clustered beneath arm three's monitor proclaimed, nearly euphoric. "This I remember from Professor Gast's research logs, I'm sure of it, from way back when! I can see it in my mind now, the backup files Shinra kept of his expedition!"

"So, what does it _mean_?" Hawk strafed around the second arm's crew, the facility's metal bones trembling underfoot. "What is it?"

"I, uh... don't understand it myself," the man confessed sheepishly. "The name of the language, though..."

"What _is_ it?" echoed Hawk, clawing a fistful of the technician's white coat.

"It's the Cetra, sir," he swallowed. "It's the script of the Ancients...!"

* * *

Yuffie wandered, grim-hearted, through the city.

These past few days had been utterly callous. Reeve's death had impacted the hardest, naturally, and its wake had left a crater in her soul. He and his organisation had bestowed a sense of purpose and direction upon the thief, which she had accepted with a rare shred of gratitude. She missed him. She missed their nonsensical calls, their cooperation, and their frequent high spirits together, even if they did both appreciate that each other's deeper issues were withdrawn. She missed scowling at the constant hair-ruffles, the father-daughter jokes they sparred back and forth, and how the WRO had offered her some semblance of a life outside her cultural revolt, her own wayward predilections, and even a sliver of discipline. She was _proud_ of what she'd become over the past few years, and as she bit down upon her lip to repress the tears, Yuffie maintained that his passing would not erase the foundations of her progress.

Her friend was dead. Vincent was questioning her, like she _belonged_ to him.  
Not two days ago, she'd feared for her life, if not her integrity.

And now, to cap off this dismal week, the heavens were spitting in her face with rainfall.

Around her, umbrellas unfurled and hoods were drawn. Paces quickened. There was an unspoken tension along the district sidewalks as people hastened to beat the oncoming downpour and reach their homes and workplaces before it drenched them through. For once in her life Yuffie was not in a rush, even as the wind flicked and lapped at her eyes, as the inclement mist of rain falling upon her like a hail of frigid needles. She was bitterly cold. Her legs lost feeling, her clothes soon dampened and clung onto her skin, and she huddled her arms around herself, those errant whispers once again calling her name.

In truth, she had her party of world saviours: Cloud and Tifa, Cid, Nanaki, and Barret. She'd had one other companion years ago, too, one whose selfless prayer had gifted a hope that the people of this world had begun to take advantage of. It was another truth that Yuffie had scarcely interacted with them since that time three years ago, except sporadic instances where they'd banded together: the Remnant crisis and the Deepground affair, to name the most memorable. Whether it was despondence or reality, she'd never sustained anything outside her budding relationship with Vincent. She was the background to others' lives.

Over the past two days, she'd sent out thirteen calls. Messages to brighten spirits, even if they were idiotic ones. That was just who she was.  
There were no missed calls. Reeve and Vincent were the only ones she'd received. Only them, and no more.

Yuffie had the print 'black sheep' etched onto her forehead, she was sure of it. The lone, stray pup from Wutai who once thieved away their Materia. It wasn't her brightest moment, but she'd sensed a great deal of antipathy and distrust from the group since then. No matter how much they preached, no matter how often they petted Yuffie's head and told her ' _it's fine_ ', and how they forgave her, she'd always felt like a coddled baby shooed away with what it wished to hear.

In her current state, she even believed that she was better off as the rogue she once was.

Beside her, carving ripples in the wet road, the WRO trucks retreated towards headquarters. Ever since their first base of operations had been all but disembowelled by Deepground and the public eye, Reeve had consulted with Yuffie on their move into central Edge. He'd been her mentor more than anyone else since Meteorfall, with possibly the exception of one dour-faced gunslinger who wasn't considerably high in her estimations at present.

Her knuckles still ached, and she cursed under her chattering breath. Vincent always found ways to linger upon her, even when she explicitly _didn't_ want to think about him. She convinced herself it was irritating. The biting squall around her woke her nerves, enflaming his presence upon her hand. The more fiercely she avoided thinking about him, the more she inexplicably found herself thinking about him. It was an unkind and pitiless sort of paradox, one she couldn't turn her back on this time. She'd tried to brush it off by suggesting it had been a subconscious thing - his eyes, she'd told him once, were like Summon Materia.

She also recalled - _with revulsion_ \- how the gormless teenager she was at sixteen had broken out in a blush, from the comment's implications.  
He never quite understood her fit. He appreciated it a tad more after she'd stolen the crew's Materia however, but not her.

Then there had been that moment between them in the Highwind's cargo deck. Vincent strode by, as theatrical as he always was, but a spate of turbulence had ripped a heavy crate from its moorings and pinned him by the cloak beneath its hefty weight. Yuffie had snickered at him. She'd openly laughed from her corner, cackling away all pale and sweaty with motion sickness, before she'd gagged and felt bile fill her throat. It was one of the most mortifying times of her life.

He'd probably never forget that.  
She definitely wouldn't.

 _Wait,_ she stopped on the pavement, frowning her bruised lips. _Since when was this about_ him _?_ _That jerk's hogging the spotlight -_ again _!_

It had been a lasting and altogether infernal spotlight in her mind. In the earlier days of their journey, Yuffie had admired Vincent's fruits of wisdom and enthralling secrecy. Those thick, even impregnable mental walls of his had been a shade intimidating at first, but the White Rose never cowered from a challenge. Onward she sought to valiantly scale and break them, one by one, refusing to give up until she'd rinsed him of his inner demons. To her, he was strange and incongruous from the rest of their species, so the warmth she pursued in blind, petulant hope had given way to some mystifying element as well.

As she grew older, she'd dismissed his pedestal in her thoughts as a foolish crush.

As she grew even older, and it still hadn't faded, she'd stomached her tongue and caged her heart. That stupid, delusional _thing_ that so often forgot his love for another, seemingly petrified in time, and encouraged her that it was _all right_ to feel this way towards him. It wasn't. It was sick and wrong. She crushed those sentiments into the earth under the heel of repression, smiled and cheered as that nuisance, that sunny little pup of the group, and fought her way on through.

Now she knew why her knuckles blazed, her singing nerves protesting even now against her earlier actions.  
She'd known all along, really.

 _She might have had a little crush - so damn what?_

Yuffie groaned, sodden through from the deluge, and splayed her hands out against a nearby shop wall. She beat into them with her forehead, before resting it against them with a twinge of shame, and regret, and all manner of coiled obscenities about to be released. _Why couldn't I just never have met him?_ she lamented inside, whining as she pelted her hands against the stonework with her skull. Her obstinate, worthless skull. _Why couldn't I just DIE, already? Ugh...!_

Another beating.

 _And why - why in Leviathan's scaly hell did I go and PUNCH him?_

The soggy, angsty thumps of inner turmoil followed.

 _Oh, man... grow up and snap out of it, Yuffie! If you want people to quit treating you like a kid, then stop swinging your emotions around like one! Clam up, steel up, and grow up! Three simple rules! Three things you've done for three years! It all runs in threes! But it's November... so it's gonna run out soon, right?_

She wanted to slump on the floor and relent to her despair, but she was the invincible flower of Wutai.

 _Damn it. Why do I have to FEEL things? Dead people don't feel things. Just kill me!  
Go on, you big watery pest, I know you're up there - go ahead, throw a lightning bolt down right now - I dare ya!_

There was nothing. Nothing but the remorseless buffeting of rainfall and wind, chilling her through down to the marrow.

She wondered if this weather was her homeland's grudge become manifest. Through all those years of neglecting their customs, scavenging for an independent life in the east, and each stepping stone of misfortune, was she cursed? Was this the wrath of Leviathan, after forsaking her family's traditions? Was it up there now, mocking her, indulging in her sorrow and grief? It didn't even have the decency to smite her. That was her luck in life.

Was this a call to leave it all behind then, and just go home? Would _that_ end it?  
She didn't know. She didn't know many things, she'd come to realise, and she wasn't half as accomplished as she'd declared.

Indeed, Reeve's death truly had impacted her the hardest among all, a blow of psychological concussion.

* * *

Sheltered under the scaffolding, Vincent flipped open his phone.

Thirteen received calls.  
One outward, only to that fool a danger to herself.  
If she believed herself so mature, then so be it.

The device chittered in his hand, a fourteenth inbound call not from Yuffie, but instead from Tifa. The light of her number upon the screen was unbearably piercing against the murky backdrop of the storm, and Vincent assumed the worst. He always did. Answering without address, he anticipated grave news.

"They found Owl." The relief was palpable, a true mother's vengeance.

"Who are ' _they_ '?" he asked, skeptical of her favourable mood. _  
Denzel shouldn't..._

"The WRO. We got word of what happened earlier, but their systems are still online," her tone lulled. "It's hard to believe he's really gone, isn't it? Did you break it to Yuffie, yet? That poor girl's had it rough, even if she doesn't show it. I'm worried about her."

That took him off-guard. "She's not with you?"

"I thought she was with you."

 _You're deflecting from Denzel,_ thought Vincent.

"She _was_ ," he confessed. "I have the mark to prove it, but I..." _assumed she'd find her way back, if only to make a stand against my over-protection._

"Well, we can't keep a leash on her," Tifa remarked. "She's not a kid, and she's always done what she wants. She's probably catching up on some rest."

Vincent quietened. He mulled over Yuffie's whereabouts with concern - far too _much_ concern, for his liking. Ever since that shuriken had been heaved, crusted in blood from the collarbone of the Don, he'd suffered through the motions of caring beyond what was acceptable in a chilling recycle of years ago. She wasn't his. He had no obligation to shield and protect her. He had no say in how she acted, in where she ventured, and yet he was always compelled to guard her.

"...Where did they track Owl?"

 _You're deflecting from Yuffie,_ thought Tifa.

"He's en route to Junon," she detailed. "We think the bastard's trying to flee the continent to Costa del Sol."

" _Is he comin' on board, or not?!_ " Cid barked through the distorted static of the background. " _This ain't a coffin ride! Tell 'em to hurry up!"_

"There goes the element of surprise," Tifa gleamed with amusement. So it _could_ return, after all. That boded well. In buoyed spirits, the barmaid laid down the challenge that loomed ahead of them, for themselves and for her weakening Denzel. "You, me and Cid off to heal the world again - think you're up to it?"


	16. XVI: The Fall

**XVI**

* * *

The Shera - _Mark III_ \- soared across leaden currents towards Junon harbour. Outside the weather was inconsolable, and assaulted the airship's windows in hazy sluices across the glass. Whether they were above city or country was just shy of impossible, the unkempt rivulets and pelting wet sprawls rendering the view a surreal portrait of the world below. Dauntless, Cid piloted the vessel through the skies, through turbulence and spells of obscurity, the flight path dictated to him through the navigation spheres studded around the wheel. Science had lifted him through Gaia's atmosphere and into the dark vacuum beyond: science wasn't going to fail him here, within the shadows of just another one of winter's tantrums. He grumbled and cussed to himself, manoeuvring as one with his ship.

" _Ouch_ ," Tifa hissed, examining Vincent's blemished cheek. The deck upon which they were gathered together rattled and shivered against the resistance of the low clouds. The former barmaid blinked, drinking in the sight of the faded welt. "She really belted you. What did you _say_ to her?"

"It's nothing of any relevance now," the gunslinger murmured. "A mistake, no more."

"Oh _no_ ," she chided, securing him by the shoulders. "We're _not_ doing this again, you hear me?"

There were few who confronted him, outside the realms of hostility. Having confided in his counsel, or simply having come to acquaintance, his insular and occasionally frosty temperament had proven difficult for many to approach. Yuffie had hewn through his emotional nettles, all brash and boorish, and now he was witness to Tifa following in similar bravado. While she was known for her kindness, Tifa was equally infamous for her iron spirit and even tougher fists.

Vincent did not contend with her, and scoffed.

Tifa had _almost_ mistaken it for mirth, and her mouth hung open, incredulous. "What was _that_?"

"I'm falling ill-"

"No, you _scoffed_!" she scolded in jest. Tifa was tickled for the first time in many tiring hours. "You just _scoffed_ at me, Mr. Valentine, don't back out!"

Vincent tucked his mouth beneath the hem of his cloak, and accepted her with a second quick, affable exhale. It was scarcely audible, something usually emitted through contempt not fondness; Tifa sensed that while it was a step in the right direction, there was a long way ahead of their relationship. She was becoming quite impertinent now, her true warmth and humour arising out of their comfort together, and their shared discomfort towards the frail ice the past hours had walked upon. With further thought, Vincent had come to realise that there hadn't been a single soul he'd introduced himself to since his reawakening who lacked some shred of impertinence, the young fool from Wutai least of all. Perhaps it was rather more a trait to which he'd found himself inexorably attracted.

"I _knew_ it," Tifa snorted, carrying an essence of pride from her observations. "Oh, you're bad to the bone!"

"Where's Cloud?" Vincent asked of her abruptly, with a sternness to him that indicated twice was _enough_. Still, she found herself fortunate enough that despite having initiated the conversation, it was neither one-way nor void completely. The hospital affair was not something she'd hoped to have broached this soon.

"Who do you think we're _really_ going after?" She studied the muddled painting of the earth below, brushed by cloudburst and grey winds. There was a wistfulness to her glance, Vincent spied, the signs of secrecy a routine to him. His past life as a Turk had not been thoroughly erased yet.

" _Owl_ ," he answered firmly. "That hasn't changed."

"Cloud left on his own again," Tifa confided. "His phone's off. He went early this morning."

"And you're giving his absence more weight than you should," Vincent proposed. His tone bordered on reproach. "He leaves indeed, but isn't it also right to say that his true talent lies in his ability to come _back_? You learned this over a year ago. This isn't about Cloud leaving. This is about you leaving Denzel."

Straight through her.  
Was she that transparent?

"I feel _awful_ about it. I mean, I actually feel _betrayed_ that he's helping. How _low_ is that? After _everything._ " Her lips twisted with the admission, but Vincent's company was strangely consoling in the same vein as the receptive neutrality of a psychiatrist's couch. She could _trust_ him. "I don't blame Cloud, I _don't_ , but this was _my_ demon to slay. We've done everything we can for Denzel, and he's in the hands of whatever powers that be now." Her hand knotted into a fist, the skin bleaching under the pressure. "I might not be able to conjure up some spell that can heal the world, but I've got the power to bring _justice_ to mine."

"Our hero's yearning runs deep," Vincent assessed dryly. She was haunted by those days spent in Mideel with Cloud's vegetative body, longing to push it away into the forgotten recesses of their new lives together. They resurfaced as salient and harrowing as the draw of a traitor's knife. Was it this legacy of Zack's she'd heard from Cloud, pillow beside pillow in the soporific calm of the witching hours, when all had been laid bare between them? Or was it the base of Mount Nibel, where all those years ago she'd snapped her leg as easily as splinter-wood, and that lonely young boy he'd always remained was cast out of the town?

"Yeah," Tifa mused aloud with a distant smile. The further they strayed from the old region of Midgar, the lighter it became; just as it used to be. The tempest's black chokehold lifted away into a milky overcast. "You're right there. Cloud loves Denzel, I know. Growing up like he did, he could have turned into something I'd rather never know about, and I'm happy about that. He never had it easy, and I think he sees bits of himself in Denzel. He'd go to the ends of the world all over again for him - for any _one_ of us - and I _know_ it's not my place to get in the way of that. Especially when it's my _pride_ in the way."

"A mother's protection is _pride_?" he posed, skeptical. With his arms folded, his fingers played a steady rhythm against the lobstered metal of his gauntlet as he pondered over her words. "There are worse things in this world than loving your child fiercely. Today marks the end of one such instance."

"You're a good person Vincent," Tifa remarked, gazing out across sky. The clouds were as soft and tame now as the downy feathers of a duckling. Astern upon the horizon, the eastern continent was absorbed into a realm as dark as pitch, swollen over the mouldering landscape. "I know it's difficult, so I won't ever intrude, but I meant what I said before. We stand by each other no matter what happens, because we're _friends_. No more bottling it up until it hurts, okay?"

"Quit yer yammering folks," Cid interrupted from the wheel. "It's _ass_ -haulin' time!"

The understanding glance shared between Vincent and Tifa was not missed, nor the sincerity behind it.

The airship hovered above the harbour, the once-glorious, tiered bastion of Shinra's shoreline defences not even a shadow of itself. It had become a monolithic tomb of those who had perished in the WEAPON raid, the lesion of which still marred the tower's peak in an immortal reminder. Fear-mongering, neglect and terror had hollowed out what remained of the population, and perilous, albeit seasoned survivors inherited Junon like flies upon a cadaver. The ruins were a rusted jungle for the lawless, who occupied the derelict streets, buildings and banks in myriad gangs joined and banded by principles of avarice and ambition. Reeve and the WRO had attempted to pacify the city earlier in the year, and he had since expounded on the necessity to reform and resurrect the economic nucleus that it used to be. Since the Deepground disaster, however, the WRO had been stretched thin. Its resources were refocused, and the plans for Junon had since fallen through.

Tifa pressed one foot up onto the airship's deck railing, the altitude furiously rending and tearing at her hair. She adjusted the strap of her parachute pack, praying that her landing would be as blessed as it had been during the Midgar riots. Determination rooted itself where fear had once been in her mind, and resolute she tightened the elastic of graphite-coloured goggles. They'd been Cloud's, originally, but he'd not been aboard the Shera since last August.

She discovered that she didn't altogether _dislike_ playing the hero. _  
_

"You ready?" she called over to Vincent, who affirmed her by taking up the same position. "Well, see you on the other side!"

Tifa vaulted over the edge, cascading headlong through the briny coastal winds.  
Vincent followed, falling in the faith of his otherworldly mantle.

The boat stationed in the port was moderate, precisely the sort of dull, uninteresting vessel that wouldn't garner too much attention on the waves. Tifa veered her trajectory towards it, posture straight and erect like an arrow bound back to the earth. The air screamed as if to urge them _away_ , to warn them of the impending sickness breeding within the city; the temperature was bitter and inhospitable, and infinitely worse at their height. Pinpricks of gooseflesh decorated Tifa's exposed arms, numbness clawing along her skin, but she couldn't gasp or shiver. She braced as the Planet surged towards her, quickening by the second.

By muscle memory alone Tifa drew hard on the tag, the parachute inflating outward in a segmented white plume. Her momentum dipped severely, blowing the wind through her throat in a surprise that was reminiscent of two years past. She wasn't greeted by the acrid belches of industry this time, but mournful silence.

Vincent's cloak unfurled, a vast and mangy spectre above her.  
Downward they drifted, in tedious circles, their flight as listless as carrion vultures swarming upon prey.

When Tifa at last struck the boat's deck, she knelt forward into a roll to shed the energy behind her course. Hastily, she threaded her arms through the backpack and discarded the ripstop puddle behind her. Vincent strode with a tempered, graceful gait, the procedure far more customary to him than for Tifa. Her breath still hadn't caught up with her yet, and she measured it in slow, purposeful lungfuls. Her cheeks were rosy from the cold pinches of the descent, and having stiffened them throughout, her thighs were shaken and near-gelatinous in sensation. It would take Tifa some time before strength returned to her.

"I hope I _never_ have to do that again," she commented, scanning the port for activity. "Can you see anything?"

Vincent drank in Junon's colossal steps, but the structure itself was far too immense to scale with sight alone. Even if Junon had disgraced itself, its incredible scope never did fail to evoke awe. The port showed no such devotion: a shoddy, derelict sequence of wooden platforms nailed together to waft with the tides.

His lack of a concrete response was sufficient enough an answer for Tifa, who through her patience with Cloud had become something of an expert in managing the introverted and taciturn. With a stumped sigh, she slacked the goggles and let them droop down by her collarbone in a particularly unfashionable necklace. Her fixation wasn't on her dress style, but instead the massive, slanted cityscape before the pair - and the hopes of reconciling her guilt over allowing Denzel to be so cruelly maimed.

Three storeys above the waterfront, the reinforced palisade ruptured and gave way. Beneath the prodigious shape of the Leviathan, Shinra's architecture was as brittle as a wall of porcelain. Rubble strewed the areas below in heavy salvos, the cracked and eroded paths exuding dusty billows of defeat against them. Astonishment pooled in the partners' pupils, both of them craning their heads towards the mighty serpent. Its vast figure uncoiled outward, and Vincent reflexively reached for Cerberus's holster with a sway of scarlet. In a shrill and ungodly screech, it reared its head back entirely.

Blood as viscous and deep as tar befouled the rooftops of the two tiers beneath it.  
The two knew then that this wasn't an ambush; the creature was wounded, fighting for its life against another.

Leviathan careered down towards the port with disconcerting speed, a cleft of devastation in its wake. Behind it, a trench of collapsed supports and scarred buildings caved inward by the enormous beast's weight pronounced flatlined the pulse of potential life in Junon. Twisted remnants of Shinra-licensed machinery and scaffolds struck the earth in individual cacophonies, splitting eardrums in whole spectrums of pitch and volume from fallen girders, crane-heads and bulk.

The summon reached the foot of Junon harbour, its destruction stilled among a great crater of debris that stirred the waters. The boat lolled and danced upon the swollen ripples, which were just minor enough to remain afloat. Tifa clung on to the railing at her side in an astounded relief of breath, her balance listing.

Prising himself free of its scaly flesh was one particularly troublesome swordsman, who windmilled onto the port. His broad, composite blade was cobwebbed by the ichor tasted of the Leviathan's veins, blackening its joints and elements. Cloud Strife squinted ahead into the sunless sea, conceiving of the two arrivals as some sort of brief mirage of encouragement. He didn't need those anymore, he told himself, and turned his back to the pier.

Still, they were persistent.  
And eerily realistic, too, unlike the bleary lens of his dreams.

" _Cloud_!" Tifa sprinted down the wooden parasite of the dock, the unsure and frail construct removed by her bounding excitement. As she drew nearer to him, the stains of injury across his body became clearer. The navy fabric he'd adopted in memory of the day he'd found Denzel was mussed and frayed, lacerated from right shoulder down below his left pectoral. His blood saturated the garment, a dark liquid flower burgeoned within the torn knit.

"Another lecture?" he angled himself side-face, whirling the fusion swords aloft. The pale-green enormity of Leviathan reanimated, disentangling itself. As it moved, its hide caught the daylight in watery gleams that brooked from its form. It was constantly exuding moisture, its skin swathed in a waterfall.

"I'm done talking," Tifa replied, fitting on a pair of enhanced fingerless gloves. "If you're done listening."

Vincent strode between them, Cerberus primed. There was an underlying friction between them, unspoken yet fearsome. Whatever had occurred between them prior would have to endure a while longer, and as the revived Leviathan unbowed before the three in shrieking hostility, the couple realised that as well.

They would, as they always had, _fight on._


	17. XVII: Fighting No More

**XVII**

* * *

Vincent harried the great serpent with gunfire, each shot punctuated by potent founts of water. Leviathan blenched and writhed against each successive volley, lashing a forked turquoise tongue in seething, alien madness. Bullets steamed and freckled across its resilient scale plates, but there was no visible wear.

Cloud sailed overhead, but his mighty downward swing was repelled by the creature's tail, which was steepled and as sturdy as the head of a pike. The ex-mercenary landed with a grunt of futility, and deflected away an otherwise lethal counter-skewer by slanting the breadth of his blades. Unsatisfied, Leviathan swatted its tip down with crippling strength, the muscles there tightly corded and damp. Cloud lunged away from the blow, stricken by a slew of splinters.

Tifa meanwhile, dashed upon the tail as it levered itself free; the dilapidated wood beneath it erred out against the tide, weak and sundered. A javelin of compressed water spiked up not an inch from her foot as she ran, and she stiffened up, adrenaline whetting her senses. She sprang forward upon the slippery terrain to escape another narrow liquid thorn, her balance jeopardised. Tifa slipped to a knee, breathing out a curse, and dove forward into a roll; _there_ , she thought to herself, eyeing the sloped cluster of flesh through which its fin protruded. As Vincent stunned the summon with another sleek burst from Cerberus, Tifa channelled her resolve into the sinew of her right arm and delivered such a crushing blow that its watery membrane fountained across the docks.

Leviathan buckled, its spine hideously contorted. Tifa dismounted, retreating over towards her companions. Cloud cleaved upward into it, scoring through its slender beak. From range, Vincent pinpointed its eye upon the recoil. Its wounds threefold, Leviathan quailed and collapsed upon its own hefty proportions, loosing gills of ropy black fluid. It didn't evade their notice that as time wore on, the blood's ebony colour evaporated away in strings of smoke.

"It will rise again," the gunslinger predicted bleakly. Generations ago, the noble houses of Wutai had fostered this creature as a reflection of their own indomitable will. It was claimed among them to be immortal, and whenever vanquished it would dissolve back into the oceans and resurrect itself over time. Yuffie's father, Godo Kisaragi, had once reminded the Turks of Shinra of its legendary behaviour, in an act tantamount to idle threat. "Don't lower your guard."

Vincent was concerned. This being was not merely a summon, but it was the seal of Wutai's highest echelons. Those who straddled the pagoda of Godo Kisaragi were by custom bestowed with this Materia, but according to Yuffie there was a second tradition of its ownership: a symbol of Wutai's protection.

 _Who could possibly...?_

"Look...!" Tifa drew notice towards the squirming monster, whose life-essence was already beginning to regenerate.

Its scarred, acute jaws snapped ajar and from its throat expelled an intense jet of water. Even as Cloud twisted aside, it streamed past him and skewered through the transom of the boat as easily as if it were acid. Vincent retaliated with a fusillade from Cerberus, but it was fruitless. Leviathan's biology was adapting, evolving, and shots which had earlier chipped and pocked into its armoured skin were dispelled against a dense, aquatic shroud.

The summon lowered its head until it slithered down upon the port, which creaked and protested beneath its weight. Leviathan undulated towards Cloud, its unhinged maw yawning hungrily until the slathering depths were set to engulf and devour. As the darkness enclosed around him, the swordsman thrust the head of his blade up into the roof of its mouth and wedged its serrated bill open. With a release of energy, Cloud embedded the edge of his unwieldy weapon between gum and fang, fissures webbing out across its enamel. When he finally dislodged it, Leviathan's left incisor broke away from the root in an inky discharge.

 _So it's not more powerful as an entity itself,_ observed Vincent. _It's just building resistances to our techniques._

Behind them, the boat's engines shuddered alive. Fumes bubbled from it, thick and acrid, and its activity ripped their attention away from the immense beast. No doubt steered by their unscrupulous prey, the three all at once hastened towards the pier. A salient whistle haunted Cloud, and mid-step he pivoted upon his heel, composite blades brought up to defy the spearing tine of Leviathan's tail. His arms were aflame with strain as he warded it away in a frustrated groan, skidding backward from its aggression. It had him pinned, and Vincent hesitated behind Tifa, glancing back towards the two engaged combatants.

 _(This was my demon to slay.)_

And slay it she would: _alone_.

Vincent bombarded Leviathan's pointed hind with a succession of gunshots, its dripping, impervious veil blistering from the force. It was just enough to guide its target off-tangent, which impaled through the timber beside Cloud. The delivery boy stepped up onto the trapped barb, staring remorsefully out towards the shore just long enough to catch the glimpse of Tifa hauling herself up onto the boat's stern. Leviathan squalled and released itself, thrashing vigorously.

In his heart, Cloud wished her well for Denzel's sake, but he was livid. He plunged his titanic sword through the creature's rear quarter, which fluttered and deadened beneath him in a squealing hiss of blood. His boots were soaked, his footfalls growing weary and laboured from the sodden march. He persevered, a wild burn kindled in his eyes as he fixated upon the fiend that had prevented him from avenging the boy who had become his own blood. If it refused to _die_ , then as he stormed upon its spine in relentless assault, he would create a means with his bare hands if he had no other choice.

He hadn't touched this fury since...

 _(...A puppet...)  
_ A tinge of hot static lanced through his mind. He faltered.  
 _(...Never had a name...)_

With another stinging lapse of focus, Cloud cried out and hacked into Leviathan's clammy hide. Reeling, its head yanked at an angle and a lethal, narrow torrent of water rocketed skyward. He struck against it again, then once more, then a third, each blow raining upon it harder and more viciously than the last. A spring of his anger, his humiliation and guilt, his grief and the cesspool of mind-rending emotions he'd suffered through were all exorcised here and now.

 _(...Cherish most...)  
_ A searing-red migraine. _  
(...Taking it away...)_

The great serpent bucked, flinging the incapacitated Cloud hard upon the pier. The wind scoured up rough and raucous through his throat, his bones clattering loudly upon impact. His shoulders had absorbed most of the fall's damage, the packs of nerves there torched with pain, and it was small fortune that he'd scarcely avoided concussion. The sky appeared almost psychedelic above him, the grey wisps of gloom eddying around like an infinitesimal tributary.

Eclipsing Cloud's view was a ragged, crimson sprawl. This hadn't been the first time he'd been spared by Vincent, whose cloak swirled above him like a listless, bloodshot eye, its tattered edges tapered away as dislocated veins. The swordsman witnessed Vincent flowing up and around Leviathan's unctuous form in rapid coils, whirling this way and that in a series of stupefying arcs. Culminating at its head, the gunslinger launched up, ejecting three bold blasts into the back of its gullet. Bullets winked inside the muscular cavern, the sight as ephemeral as myths themselves, before they drowned beneath a thick, bubbling well of blood. Leviathan bundled onto the earth once again, its hideous figure cavorting and frenetic as if in the throes of electrocution.

"You're not a fighter anymore." Vincent reloaded Cerberus, thumbing silver ammunition into its shafts.

"Seems so," Cloud grimaced. It was true: Tifa had regularly exercised her martial arts, both with and without Denzel and Marlene as her students. He, however, had been a delivery boy for so long now even the hilt of his fusion blades was peculiar and unnatural to him; he was softer, as rusty as Junon itself.

"One wonders if you ever were," Vincent mused. It was a caustic, even hurtful accusation on the surface, but it was just as enlightening.

"If I..." _ever was?_

Cloud had failed SOLDIER; he had failed Zack; he had failed Nibelheim; he had failed himself and his companions, when he hailed himself as a warrior. The colder his blade was, the more prone it was to crack and split. Wielding it with warmth, under the banners of protection and heart, and he had foiled a would-be god's designs. It wasn't complicated; a fighter didn't equate to a protector, and vice versa. He had just muddled himself somewhere along the way, that was all. Perhaps, Cloud concluded as he eased himself to his feet, he was _not_ a fighter. He never had been. He was just a lonely boy from a lonely mountain town, blessed to have close friends and a family he'd lay his life down for. It wasn't in combatting evil where he'd truly triumphed over it: it was in sacrificing every last shard of himself to defend those he loved. Even years later, he realised, the crisis of his identity had not yet fully been resolved.

The pall of water around Leviathan sloped earthbound into the creature's shadow, and like the head of an sandglass it broadened. Concentric rings of moisture rippled and distended outward, weeding through timber with the rapacity of a pandemic. The pattern birthed an immense tidal wave thirty-five feet in height, which battled at first, swelling and bloating in its unstoppable overflow, before finally surging in the sea's valiant effort to drag down the sky. Leviathan, the idol of Wutai, had summoned forth the death sentence for the two mortal beings who dared to defy its destructive nature, and it was both grand and horrifying. What dying sunlight that pealed through the clouds in jagged amber arteries was swallowed by the wall, and it closed in - roaring, inevitable, vehement.

Cloud and Vincent together stood steadfast against it, dwarfed in all but their will. The delivery boy - not the fighter, not the winner, but the _protector_ \- brought his blade aloft and began to revolve it in sweeping circles. Licks of molten, blue energy crackled and galvanised along its cragged length.

With an overhead cleave, Cloud discharged the energy forward. The lambent beam tunnelled into the foot of the water-mountain, and in miraculous starburst it divorced the tides from the collision alone. It burrowed towards the frothing, cresting waves, each movement brighter and more formidable than the last. Sapphire light glimmered and caught the waning sunlight with the eruption's magnitude, a stunning inundation in which Cloud swore Denzel's smile reflected.

The hybrid blades arced swiftly through the beautiful devastation and gored through Leviathan's palate.  
It listed backward, its howl chilling to the bone.

The fang of Cloud's weapon had buried into its brain, severing vital functions in a choking black flux. The swordsman's boots straddled its dead, frozen jaws. Cloud fought and pulled at the hilt, upsetting the steel in a leaking blood-mire as he inched open the rent muscle. Leviathan was stilled with shock, its world passing in stuttered, whitewashed lags. With a final wrest, Cloud unsheathed his sword, slicked in dark plasma as cold as snow to his skin. He dropped from its chin, plunging a tremendous wedge of metal into the beast's throat. He skimmed down its front, doused in pungent spoor, dripping with the sea's embrace, yet with all that remained of him he split the serpent in from windpipe to its bowels. Flesh and meat dragged open behind him in a gushing, visceral avalanche.

Its contract fulfilled, the summon dissipated into maroon light.

"I should be on there," Cloud murmured towards the boat, the conversation stilted and uncomfortable. He slotted the fusion blades into the holster across his back, never once looking towards Vincent, the pair of them frigid and the exact likeness of Tifa's image of them together. "Not in his yard, killing the pet."

 _So Owl_ is _being sponsored by Wutai._ The gunman's suspicions were confirmed; it didn't sit well with him. "Every lock has its components. If you wish to open the door ahead of you, you must play the part that was predetermined for you, like it or not... on your own, neither of you would be there now."

"Huh," Cloud blew out air, sarcasm prickling over him. "Summer came early. The ice sculpture's melting."

Vincent feigned ignorance.

* * *

Tifa wandered through the boat's lower deck, a bland and insipid metal tub. Tacked to a cork board was a map of the three continents - East, West and Wutai, with a taut yellow string pinned between the former and latter. There was no mention of Costa del Sol, only sea routes from Junon harbour to the Wutai coast. With each sickening err and sway of the boat upon the water, Tifa steadied herself, the tack pins rolling around their tray, clinking together feverishly.

Her muscles fluttered eagerly, her heart throbbing in anticipation of the vengeance to come.

Owl was there, guiding the boat with nautical maps crinkled and jaundiced around the helm. He was there, the man who mutilated and hospitalised her Denzel. Her son and angel. The man responsible for the loss of her home, of _Denzel's_ home, of _Cloud's_ home. The man was butchering an exotic song, the whiny melody interspersed with slurred, foreign lyrics. Each breath that he drew was one stolen from her son, each verse another virulent, mocking blow to her and her family.

She _hated_ him.  
Those leathery fingers clutched around the wheel spokes were stained in Denzel's blood, and she _hated_ him.

Her eyes were bleary. Even if a thousand branches of lightning resonated across the Planet at once, she wouldn't have retracted her glare even for a second's respite. This was deeper than hate. More than hate. This was the tears fallen across Denzel's cheek; this was the hopeless stare he'd given her up through charred skin; this was the weak confession of ' _Mom'_ to her ears, a twinge to her heart; this was her son, her world; this was _everything_. This was her failure; her failure to make a claim on the life they deserved; her failure to be a _mother_ ; damn her dignity to the lowest hell, she'd take back all that was owed to her.

And he would _look_ upon her as she drove the life from him.

Each step was the prowl of a trained huntress, forging heat and fire into her veins, casting a mould of iron over her expression.

She must have been breathing harder than she thought. Within striking reach Owl pivoted around, a knife unclipped from his belt-line, its slim, ugly point sailing around in reverse-grip towards the brunette's temple. Tifa snared his wrist in a hold that reminded him of a prison shackle, and pulled his arm out until it was rigid and inflexible at her mercy. With a thrust of her free palm, she snapped his elbow inward. Yowling, the oily-skinned _thing_ she'd vowed to kill crumbled to his knees, the bones of his right arm protruding in at an unnatural angle so as to make his ash-grey sleeve lumpy and saturated with blood. His knife beamed as it struck the floor, combing light from its shaft, dancing and teetering from hilt to tip before Tifa swept it aside with her shoe.

 _He wouldn't learn if she used that_.

" _You_... p-please," Owl whimpered. He looked up towards her with plaintive, wet eyes. "Please, do no... I, uh... I use fire only to _scare_ , I did no _mean_...!"

Hers was a countenance without pity.

"I give you so _wealth_!" Like any other stuck pig, Owl's pleas bled on and on, his broken language gaining little sympathy. "I am going at Wutai, I... I have friends there, good, good friends, who present me much... good wealth, good promises, good friends... I give you them! _All_ of them, for your _boy_ , I... _please_...!"

Tifa flattened his finger against the back of his hand, the knuckle-joint crackling violently as if it were tinder. Owl released a shrill wail, stricken with horror, that roughened his throat raw. His deep olive eyes bellied out of their sockets. His tortured rictus showed off a mouth chequered by chipped and filthy teeth.

" _Aaaa_ - _aah...!_ Y-you... fucking whore _bitch!_ " He fumed, pained, a rogue animal bitten and wounded at her leash. "Why don't you fucking _listen_?! I offer you everything! Everything that belong to me, everything of mine... is yours now! Is all yours, see? Hear me, bitch?! Take! Take, is all _yours_...!"

"Hell hath no fury, they say," Tifa mulled. She'd never been in this sort of position before, the one with the reins, the power. Now that she was, all earlier care and meticulous craft of her plans was worthless to her. She'd scrapped every fantasy, every which path her mind had invented for this moment, all thousand instances strewn behind in mere, abandoned forethought. She trembled, unsure of herself, _scared_ of herself; scared of what she could _do_. What she _would_ do. "But I think that saying's bullshit. Woman, man, _whatever_ you are... once your world's threatened, it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference. We all show who we are when what matters most to us is put in jeopardy. When _your_ life's hanging in front of you, you snivel and bargain like a kid who's wet himself."

He resisted her, throwing out his only intact arm in an embarrassing, frail swing.

"When _my_ world was in danger, I helped to bring down a _god._ " She continued, unaffected by all but her own vitriol and a twinge of humanity. She cursed that sensitive slice of herself, that young girl from Nibelheim who stumbled over her own two feet and wept at Zangan's feet for ten lessons straight. What would that little darling conceive of the woman she'd matured into now? "So what do you think I'm gonna do to the pathetic little weasel who put my world at risk again?"

"You... _good_ ," Owl shrank beneath her, sagging down against the wheel. He coughed, a weak sneer of resignation. "Good bar girl won't _kill_. You are no Vincent Valentine, eh? Think of blood on those pretty hands... not right for them, I think... ah... _aha_..."

Tifa hooked her foot up beneath Owl's chin, cutting him down into a litter of slim, spidery limbs. His jaw reverberated long after Owl had straggled over the floor, teeth vibrating dizzily in their rotten nests of gum. "I killed right in front of your eyes, and you're still giving me the ' _angel_ ' treatment." She'd stopped being a dreamy, rosy-eyed sweetheart the moment she'd embraced AVALANCHE's cause. The slums were no noble castle; if he thought she was some _princess_ even now just for having some considerate and protective conscience, even after having collapsed two grown men's windpipes right before him, then he truly deserved to decay at the bottom of the sea. "How many men were already gone, do you think, before you threw your life away together with that bottle? _Get up_."

It flowed from her now, radiant from her pores.  
The thoughts of Denzel; the thoughts of those girls; the thoughts of all he'd done, to all those other families.

She wasn't some princess, she knew that, but neither was she a monster.

"You like being _forced_ to do something?" Tifa slashed another kick into his ribs as he crawled along beneath her. He hitched and hacked up bloody saliva, slanting onto his broken arm. "How is it, suffering like they did?" It felt liberating. _Satisfying_. Tifa felt better than him. _Higher_ than him. She repeated, " _get up_."

Owl panicked. There wasn't a way out. He still searched in vain, head wagging towards the east window, then the west. There was nothing. Nowhere to run. When the cap of her shoe clubbed into his ribs a third time, his strength gave out in a wheezing snarl. He heaped onto the floor, his breaths sharper, quicker, more desperate and selfish than ever as they sought to drink up all the oxygen inside the vessel for himself as a final spite. His despair curdled into something else, something acute and angry and so far removed from humanity he shivered and squirmed like an odious insect pressed beneath a sole.

Upon the sight of him, Tifa worried for herself. She was transforming into a beast without end; if she dared to enjoy it, if she dared to lower herself to his savagery, then she might lose the very heart she'd longed to salvage from the slums and that sleepy mountain town she and Cloud could call home.

She couldn't be proud of the deaths on her hands. She couldn't.

It wasn't who she was. This wasn't right. It was sick.  
Tifa retreated back a step, on the verge of discarding the _waste_ that he was.

"Dead," spat Owl, so hopeless, so cynical of the human psyche that he'd become hysterical. "Little Denzel is _de-ad!"_ he crooned in grisly derision; _"Denzel, Denzel... dead little Denzel, little Denzel... ha, ha...!_ "

Incensed by all that she despised, forgetting herself, Tifa stamped down onto the side of his head. Everything quaked around him, the blunt collision striking deep even into his optical nerves. He wormed forward, slowly, agonising, drooling out Denzel's name time over time. He jeered her, reddening her, slighting her heart and soul until the torn ribbons left of them asphyxiated him. She trampled her heel down upon him, harder, harder, harder again with each infernal echo.

 _Denzel!  
Denzel...!  
De...nzel...  
_

By the time Owl stopped moving, Tifa stood over him, hyperventilating, shaken to the core, and cold.  
So impossibly, terribly cold.


	18. XVIII: What We See Every Day

**XVIII**

* * *

Later, when dusk reigned over Edge, Vincent stepped out onto the rooftop of the WRO's medical wing. The residue of the earlier storm still hung fresh in the air, carrying cool, brisk winds that disturbed hair and vestment alike. He drew the stairwell shut behind him, invited into an uncomfortable, prominent silence. Opposing him was Yuffie, whose exuberance was in cinders from the moment he caught the tragedy behind her smile. That was his fault too, he told himself.

"I know, I _know_ ," the young ninja excused herself excitedly, "what's with the cliché secret meeting place, right? Well as it turns out, it's not just a HUGE cliché but it's also pretty accurate, to boot! Nobody else can hear a thing - it's just _you_ and _me_ , buddy!" Hours ago, she'd cried up here. None had come to her rescue. She'd rubbed her eyes raw, and only just now regained her composure enough to shoot the dead man a text. ' _We need to talk'_. It was never a sterling omen.

"You've been crying," Vincent perceived.

Yuffie retaliated, barbed and defensive as ever. "Uh, did you not see the _huge storm_ that _just_ blew over? _Hello-o_?"

The darker bodies beneath her eyes spoke differently, but Vincent was not about to pursue it any further. He had made that mistake before, prying into affairs that he'd incorrectly deemed to be theirs together. He truly was a generation away from them all, the functions of an aged man incarcerated within an undying, ivory tomb of false youth. The physical mark had subsided now, but the gap of their incompatibility had started to bore away into the depths of his mind; nagging, persistent, pessimistic and most wickedly of all, of slight truth. Maybe, simply, his experiences had made him this way: wary and doubtful.

"...The WRO-" Vincent began, curious.

"-Doesn't have a leader anymore, so a ton of people came to fight for it," Yuffie finished, reading his signals. "Barret rolled up; some creepy-lookin' one-eyed dudes with giant headdresses too, dunno who they are; I think even _Shinra's_ here, y'know, throwing their weight around as usual. Cid burst in late. They're still at it about who's gonna get control over the WRO now, since... well, Reeve the dumb-ass decided to make a back-up plan for everything _but_ his death."

"And who do you imagine to be the most compelling candidate?" Vincent was beside her now, overlooking Edge's nightlife. A warmth exuded from him that she hadn't fully apprehended before, and without thinking she inched closer to him. The smoke from Grimhaven, far to the northwest, had finally extinguished. Whatever cancer was festering away within it now would have to wait. This was, as she'd claimed before, just the two of them. It was their time.

"Nobody," she was halfway to a sulk. He admired her honesty. "They all _suck_ , and none of them think like Reeve... they're all in it for themselves."

"You may be right," Vincent conceded with softer fondness to his features. Reeve had a certain way with people. He cared more about them than he did about himself, hence the shortage of protocols concerning his inheritance; it was testament to how occupied these years had been. "What are you going to do?"

"I thought about goin' home for a bit," Yuffie admitted. "Then I remembered my stuffy old man. I hate being tied down, y'know? I wanna do something _amazing_ , again, Vinnie! I wanna travel around the world some more, just me, my wits and the wind, like it used to be before... well, I got tied down!"

Vincent was not deceived so easily. He could translate her, fluent in all but the girl's most intimate sentiments. "I thought you said we were alone?"

"Yeah, _and_?"

"So why are you still trying to be so tough?" His question jabbed Yuffie like a finger of ice, and startled, some colour returned to her. The burnished chestnuts of her eyes flourished with dismay, and her cheeks swathed with pink. It was a bashful, organic response, one which unveiled the naivety of her years.

"I _am_ tough," she grumbled, picking at her nails. Her fingers weren't ladylike at all. They were calloused, and her nails were short and flat from natural erosion through the passage of adventure in Gaia's wilderness. She certainly didn't look like a princess; in her prepubescent years, she'd not even looked like a girl, with her short-cut, messy bowl of brown hair and notoriously quick-heated temper. The ' _rag doll prince_ ', her father's entourage had called her in derision.

" _Tough_ isn't a state of being," Vincent put to her. "If one were like that all the time, one might as well be stone. I once told you that to endure was to be human... I was wrong. To endure is to relinquish life; it is to repress and foil, to deny oneself the opportunity to be truly alive. To be human, I've found, is to embrace one's emotions - to laugh and cry, to scream and hurt, to let them guide and nurture us - for that's what separates us from statue and machine. We may hold awe towards those things, even revere them, but... there is no substitute for human love. You can be tough, but more often than not you're _human_."

"I _knew_ you were gonna spew out another lecture," Yuffie griped, nevertheless nestling herself against Vincent's arm. "You never let me get what I want!"

"You won't learn if I do." He felt the heiress of Wutai let out a hard sigh of frustration, though he didn't cave to her demands.

" _Ugh_ ," she snorted, "all those days wasted flunking class, only to end up huddled up to the biggest, most boring _loser_ on the Planet!"

"Yet here you still are." Vincent observed, the arm against which she'd pushed her scant weight surrendering to her insistence. Quietly, almost stealthily, the gunslinger brought it around Yuffie's back and allowed her to burrow into his side. She did so without a word, blanketing herself beneath the sanguine-red drape of his cloak. Swaddled within it, the ninja seemed slighter, more vulnerable in stature, yet she clung onto him with a tight, bristled fervour that suggested she'd slit his throat in his sleep if he recounted this story elsewhere. With neither of them particularly comfortable with affection, their postures were stiff and compromised, as though they suspected a knife to the ribs at any moment. It was a daring act, an act steeped in unbidden thoughts and unspoken confessions.

" _Yet here I still am_ ," she repeated with a facetious smile.

As one they crouched upon the edge, far above the light-speckled thicket of civilisation below.

They shared silence after that, unravelling imaginary conversations with one another that they daren't bring to life. For twenty minutes they envisaged what might have been, and what might never have been. Yuffie was a vibrant person, and even asleep she'd muss her sheets, threshing like a captured fish in a net, but she was tranquil now. All her previous thoughts of home, of that stray pup cut loose from the pack, melted away heartbeat by heartbeat. Maybe he wasn't still just a parasite on his past. Maybe she'd reached through to him at last. Maybe that blow had endowed him with some positivity; maybe he _didn't_ still love _her_ , embroiled in that never-ending chasm of self-torment, judgment and ill worth, all over a selfish scab of a woman who'd experiment on her own unborn son. Yuffie would never have performed those repulsive acts. Yuffie would have cherished and adored her son, and he'd be the apple of her eye and the key to her heart. He wouldn't be _lab specimen number three-thousand and eighty-five._ He would bear the blood of Leviathan, and assume his mother's stalwart heart.

This rumination over family brought her to a different direction; her and pregnancy, especially now, did not mix. Adoption was always an option. Tifa had all but become Denzel's foster mother, and Cloud his father, but Yuffie didn't possess Tifa's level of responsibility or worldly acumen. For that, she was a little envious.

"Say," she chirped up, "how's Tifa doing?"

"As Denzel's condition remains inconclusive," Vincent said, "so too is hers... never have I witnessed such devotion."

"She's so brave," Yuffie marvelled, swinging her leg loosely. Vincent could not ignore a trace of yearning in her tone. "And beautiful. _And_ strong. When she told me about her life story, I nearly cried. Lucky for me, I never do... but I got _real_ close! The stuff she's gone through is a _million_ times worse than anythin' _I've_ gone through. When I grow up, I wanna be just like Tifa," she sniffed, hugging avidly onto the gunslinger; "not this... spoilt little _rag-doll_... ugh, damn it..."

"Only Tifa can be herself," Vincent posited, "just as only you can be yourself. If you imitate what you think you ought to be, you'll only live through imitations of a path already trodden. History has repeated itself enough. Stay true to who you are, and who knows where your own path may lead you..."

"Oh _gawd_ , that's the mushiest thing I've ever _heard!_ Still..." Yuffie leaned up, gracing Vincent's cheek with a coy kiss. It was as fleeting as the trail of a shooting star, and equally as ardent. A tremble of passion inspired within them, one that she frantically sought to quash with a cough. "Thanks, Vinnie. And _sorry_..."

He retreated into himself. That shell of an emotional tundra his had enclosed around him, but she didn't care: the White Rose of Wutai was always victorious. If she cleared this one last atrocious subject in earnest and in faith, knowing that he was here, knowing that he had been there for her through three years, through all those horrible moments of shame, humiliation, malaise and woe, there was the slightest chance that he might even have listened to her - and _not_ been frightened away into the night. She juggled with it, chewing on her lip with indecision. The adrenaline from the kiss had enflamed her. Why the hell not?

"...Sorry for clobberin' you, jerk, and..."

She was always victorious.  
 _Always_.

"...And I..."

She was fearless, proud, invincible and without flaw.  
It was the perfect mood, the perfect time, the perfect place.

She had nothing to shy away from.

"...I..."

 _Nope._

"...I hope everyone feels better soon," Yuffie diverted herself wildly, in red-faced retreat.

 _Not today._

She curbed what could well have transformed this evening into a disaster. Yuffie wasn't a romantic girl. Feelings, she'd always been taught, were a weakness. She resolved to remove them as quickly as extracting venom, and just as pragmatically. Ninja weren't supposed to lead with their hearts. That stupid pulse inside her, the one which had encouraged her to begin that doomed sentence, was as vapid as all the other girls in Wutai she'd derided. It was _not_ the perfect mood, it was _not_ the perfect time, and it was most definitely _not_ the perfect place. Whatever issues she was contesting with, she was sure that Vincent did not requite them; neither of them were looking to be troubled, or touched, or aggrieved after all they'd faced lately. They needed, and deserved, one quiet night.

A quiet, simple, harmless night. So that was what they shared - _together_.

* * *

There were six figures seated around the WRO council table, a cream decagon canvas the broad face of which devoured almost the entire chamber. The chairs were miniature thrones of crafted leather plumped with stuffing and fine claret-coloured cushions. It might have appeared a decadent affair, had the room not been tarnished by endless brooks of argument. Barret Wallace of AVALANCHE and Cid Highwind of the WRO's airship division were in a particularly torrid engagement, and having exhausted conventional curses they now resorted to more creative means of insulting and undermining one another's characters.

Provided with a sublime view of the verbal skirmish was the ever-cunning Rufus Shinra, whose amusement manifest in glimmers to his eye. Stood behind him was the suited shadow of Turk leader Tseng, arms folded across his front, as ominous and sober as the toll of an elegy. Malvern was there too, a wizened man in his winter years not five feet in height with a slender, knotted white beard that tickled his knees. Formerly a Shinra employee, he was now a self-made entrepreneur who boasted job search circuits across the continent. Lady Amelia, a stunning businesswoman with stark black hair worn in a ponytail and a glare that smouldered even through her shades, had attracted attention through both her aggressive, icy disposition and her prosthetic left leg. Her speech pattern seemed oddly familiar to Shinra, who studied her occasional outbreaks enrapt by the nostalgia of the tumult of the Shinra Corporation board meetings.

"Pardon me," Shinra suspended the incessant horn-butting of Cid and Barret, his voice a sinfully dulcet composure. He trained it upon the sixth and final member of their impromptu summit, an ashen woman whose thin simper had given away nothing but her introduction by name of Silette. Her bounteous, sterling hair was poured back by the combs of a blocky headdress, and there was a preternatural ambience to her. Fortunately, the President of Shinra had never known himself to suffer discord by another's hand. "You haven't spoken since this unpleasant afternoon began. Are you going to put forward your case?"

"Ho-ho," the strange woman tittered. "I'm afraid... I've forgotten what it was!"

"Who allowed this _cretin_ in here?" Lady Amelia demanded, wafting the shaft of a smoking pipe between gloved fingers. "I'll have them flogged!"

"Aw, _shuddap_ ," Barret growled. "Not like you ain't jes' been a bitch who dumped on all'a our ideas all day, anyways! Where's your award-winner, huh?"

"It's as I _said_ ," the woman took a long, indulgent inhale from the pipe, and breathed out a scented plume; she was as patient as she was incisive, much to the chagrin of the eco-warrior. "The people of Edge are acquainted with the terrors of both Shinra and AVALANCHE, who have been culpable in the deaths of hundreds." She clucked her tongue in disapproval, lips quirked into a mischievous smile. "With all of those _raunchy_ secrets oozing free after each new excavation of Midgar, the President simply _won't_ do to champion a new world restoration project. Mind you, neither will a gun-toting meathead whose only public accolade is the destruction of jobs, lives, and precious household resources. I say bring a new face to the WRO, one that _isn't_ tainted with innocent blood."

"' _Innocent blood_ '?!" Barret echoed, fitful in his rage. "Who th'hell do you think you are?!"

"Wait a moment," Malvern stroked his beard, fingering the wispy, woollen strands ponderously. "What is your proposition then, Lady Amelia?"

"The east has had its time," the businesswoman concluded. "Perhaps we should consider western influence."

"Wutai?" Malvern leaned forward, incredulous. "Y-you mean those foreigners, _here_ , leading the reconstruction of our own lands?! _Preposterous_!"

"As preposterous as a short-sighted, wrinkled bigot like you, old man?" Lady Amelia dashed her pipe's embers into an ashtray. "Mr. Wallace, Mr. Highwind; you are vulgar sacks of testosterone, neither of whom the people will come to respect or love. They abhor and distrust Shinra, although their financial resources are no doubt a notch above AVALANCHE's own; perhaps, then, I might suggest a Shinra-Wutai collaboration? A reminder of what true world rebirth should be like."

To her left, she heard President Rufus Shinra ridicule the notion. "If you want to promote truly new ground, then find a new agent altogether."

"Wutai ain't gonna drag their sorry asses all the way over here," Cid pointed out. "'Specially not to jump into bed with _Shinra!_ What are you on?!"

"Very well then," Lady Amelia stood among the commotion, her artificial foot rapping against the floor. "It's getting late, regardless. I bid you sleep on what little ground we've covered today. It's going to be a long and obstinate road ahead, since none of us are actually _looking_ for consensus. We'll reconvene tomorrow."

"Agreed," Shinra held his glare towards the woman. _Familiar indeed_. "Shall we say ten o'clock?"

"Fine by me," Cid shrugged, grateful that this godforsaken mess was reaching its end.

"Whatever," groused Barret, already barging his way towards the door.

Silence from Silette the peculiar visitor, who absconded from the meeting amidst a shambling, grey flock of followers, and did not attend any future conventions thereafter. Her absence was not noted, her presence not remembered, but her vacant smile remained stagnant upon lips as colourful as a corpse.


	19. XIX: The First Council

**XIX**

* * *

The early hours had been damp, and the subsequent morning reined in a thick fog across Edge. Buildings mounted high into the pale vacuum above, like the headless stalks of goliath stone trees. Its population milled in indistinct, ghostly blurs, warded away from the roads by the warring motes of headlights. The city was an unsafe and untrustworthy place, even more so following the rift between the people of Grimhaven; nature, in its prescience, was inclined to agree.

A second meeting in the WRO Headquarters was underway.

"Thirty-six," Lady Amelia emphasised in melodrama; " _thirty_ - _six_ burglaries, last night alone! This _cannot_ stand!"

"These people are stupid," Rufus Shinra answered, pushing back a full, polished bronze fringe. "It's not surprising they'd act out. If they have no qualifications, and no prospects, what else can they do but claw for money through the only means they've known growing up? They're beasts, cornered and afraid. That's all. Malvern, your enterprise is providing employment for the needy, isn't it?"

"That it is, Mr. Shinra," the senior man was raking feeble fingers through his beard.

"So deal with it."

"Were that I able to," Malvern resisted, his elderly groan a constant - and rather grating - undertone throughout. "Many of these people will have criminal histories to consider, and then there's of course an application process..."

Shinra grated his teeth in irritation. _That ponderous old gremlin._ "What _pinhead_ sponsored you, again?"

"And let's not forget the midnight raid at the old metalworks plant," Amelia brought up, shuffling the report documents. "Fire damage to the apartments nearby, two young girls dead from ash inhalation; twenty girls found in locked rooms throughout, ten more kept like sardines underground; all of them naked, all of them half-starved and severely dehydrated." She swiped her papers over as if having finished her own obituary, nostrils flaring. "Disgusting!"

"Ain't that right," Barret grunted. "For once..."

"The old metalworks place," Malvern revised. "That was the Don's base of operations, wasn't it?"

"He lost quite some popularity when people found their mothers, sisters and daughters among the captives." Shinra's distaste for debauchery was no secret, and he made no effort to conceal the repulsed curl of his lip. "As I recall, an article today mentioned that the Don and his men would send the families forged letters from northern or western continent-based firms; the most common, naturally, being work in the Gold Saucer park. When news spread of the Don's... _unsavoury_ appetites, entire cells of Grimhaven residents marched to the abandoned facility and tore it apart looking for their loved ones. Others, well..." Shinra snorted, "others simply enjoyed the ride, like hounds out of a car's back window, and torched the place in the heat of the moment. It's a typical mob mentality."

"Appalling," Malvern muttered to himself. "Simply appalling..."

"So we have a block of people in blind outrage," Amelia summarised. Her pipe twined through her fingers, one of which rapped in ill temper against the slim shaft. "And another who mourn for their so-called ' _occupations'_. That's without the traumatised women and young girls, too. We'll arrange a funeral for them."

"The victims notwithstanding," Shinra offered; "I suggest that the WRO begin a recruitment drive. That way, it can absorb the troublemakers, keep them close, and provide direction and income for those who need it. With due training, the organisation would boast a plentiful fighting force."

"Ridiculous. Have you _forgotten_ what some of those men have done?" Lady Amelia arched over the table towards Shinra, simmering with an intensity from which the President once again related to the past. Her voice was low and husky, cured through years of nicotine addiction. "Through their silence, they've been complicit in the Don's atrocities! I say the WRO should punish each and every one of those who were directly involved in Santeo's unlawful deceptions!"

"Spoken as the true developer of the Nova Defence Project," scorned Shinra. His jibe was far lighter than the pinched expression that now clouded over Amelia. "Perhaps all those months of butchering WEAPON carcasses have isolated you from how people work these days. Even if we could pick out every single individual that you've spoken about, not only would we be clueless as to how deep their knowledge ran, but a public slaughter would divert their anger onto the WRO. Reeve had been very particular about avoiding civilian bloodshed; I say we pay him this final respect by honouring that."

Amelia fumed, dropping back into her seat with a petulant scowl.  
 _You've weakened, President._

"...War-mongerin' _asshole_!" Cid kicked up his boots onto the tabletop, having been reticent for most of the discussion that morning. Some had assumed he'd sunken into a hungover stupor, while others were so self-absorbed they scarcely noticed. Barret hadn't, and his sudden declaration had caused the hefty man - much to his chagrin - to bristle with surprise. "Always got those beady eyes on _soldiers'f_ some kind! Well, what if some kid's good with a wrench, or knows his way 'round engine parts? Airship division needs numbers, too, damn it! Split the newbies down the middle, and I'll stick my oar in with ya!"

"An interesting point. All right." An idea brewed in Shinra's head. This leadership debate had become of secondary importance in the aftermath of the Grimhaven riots, and now they were deliberating upon affairs almost as if they weren't competitors. He had conceded to himself in the ruins of his family's legacy that the Shinra Company had shed much of its people's faith in the past few years. The grisly depths of secrets that he and his forefathers had neglected to reveal were now under scrutiny. Shinra would not be revived from this; the WRO had become the epitome of rebirth in this world, and as the apex of hope, its continued survival was of paramount worth. His empire would lurk and wait, a patient puppeteer under another name on the global stage. "And one that invites my next proposal: that we abandon a system of autocracy. Since none of us would accept another's leadership bid, I move that we create a _council_ for the WRO instead."

"All'a that fancy puke's givin' me a headache! _Shit_!" Cid rumbled from his chair, arms flung around. "What's that gotta do with my newbies, Shinra?!"

"A _lot_ , actually," Shinra opened his arms as if in corporate presentation address. It was the impulse he'd never lost. "You see if we created a council, we'd be able to decide on these sorts of matters with a vote between us, instead of just one person arbitrarily throwing around the rules. We would lead the WRO as a group, but each of us would oversee a different department tailored to our individual talents; you, for instance, would keep your 'Airship' department, and Lady Amelia here would be in charge of 'Defence'. We can acquire the old goat's employment agencies and incorporate them into an 'Industry' department, too."

 _Just like Shinra used to be, then_ , noted Amelia.  
It was an observation common between them all, and their internal disputes brought silence across the board.

If they were being truthful to themselves, it didn't sound too awful. There were misgivings about how it would function, and how their personalities would seam as one over time, but it was by far and away the most progress-conducive recommendation that the contentious table had heard in almost twenty-four hours.

The only difficulty was that it had come from _Shinra's_ mouth.

"...An' what would that make _me_?" Barret posed. He forced a look of gruff indifference.

"Why, 'Energy', of course." Rufus knew it wouldn't last. The fool would come up short, and in the dearth of Mako substitutes it would be his burden to bear. Shinra Electric Power Company was nursing itself. It was biding its time in low-profile hibernation. Its time had not yet come to pass.

"And _you_ , Shinra," Lady Amelia asked; " _your_ position would be...?"

"As you said yesterday, I'm in no position to engage in any _public_ affairs." His concession was so clear and nonchalant that it edged towards the suspicious. "It was my intention to partner with one of you who could be used as a mouthpiece for our ideas, but this is much better structured. I will head the 'Finance department."

Amelia was a shark to the blood of his motion. "So you can drain all the WRO's money when you get _bored_ of it?"

"So I can _fund_ the only thing that's got a chance of repairing the world," _and all the calamity I've brought upon it._

"I dunno 'bout this," Barret chewed over his options, his tongue smearing over rows of teeth. Partnering with Shinra was the most unpleasant taste of them all. "It just _sounds_ wrong, y'know... cosyin' up with the Shinra, I don't like it..."

"We won't be _cosy_ at all," Rufus countered. "We just have to act with some professional dignity. You will have a proper place, with proper resources to conduct your research. We will talk at most once, even twice a month to cover our bases as a council. I don't intend on listening to you more than that, I assure you."

Malvern shifted forward, aged bones creaking like a rocking horse. He cleared his throat, "I'd counsel a trial period."

 _You'd counsel a fish to swim in water,_ stung Amelia. The doddering old wreck was becoming more senile by the hour, it seemed. "Fine."

"Hell, I'll give it a shot," Cid shrugged.

"Jes' stay outta my way," Barret glowered over towards the Shinra president. He bundled himself up tighter, his arms veritably constricted around his chest, and appeared to spill out of the confines of his chair. While the furniture was elaborate, its manufacturers hadn't taken Barret's almost ursine physique into account.

"If we all agree to this development," Rufus hung on his pause, eyeing each nod of theirs in turn for a sign of acceptance; "then we return to our earlier issue. The WRO will develop a program of recruitment, not just for its military but for its ancillary and medical personnel as well. As far as I'm aware, Mr. Highwind and myself advocated this approach, while you were in favour of stricter punishments for the people involved. We have two votes left."

"I stand by Mr. Shinra," proclaimed the ever-unctuous Malvern.

"Then it don't matter what I want," Barret said. "Even if I was gonna say we need faces who got eco-skills..."

"What in Gaia's name are ' _eco skills_ '?" Amelia sniped, largely out of affront that she'd been denied her plan. "Speak properly, you overgrown oaf!"

"Ain't _nothin_ ' wrong with the way I talk, woman! Put two an' two together! _Eco skills_!" Barret blustered, writhing furiously. "Arghh, shut yo' face!"

"The First Council has spoken then," Rufus professed over their noisome quarrel. His fingers were steepled, countenancing deeper concentration. "We will introduce a recruitment program in the coming days. Have it broadcast across the city - across the continent, and the rest of _Gaia_ if the need calls for it. In the meantime, what do we say about allocating the military we already have as a citywide police force?"

Mumbles and half-hearted gestures of acquiescence came forth, from all except the dark-haired businesswoman.

"If we're to do that, then we have to make sure that Wutai isn't up to its old tricks again. The military needs to be flexible." Amelia wafted her pipe, guiding fragrant tapers of smoke across the table. "Again, I encourage inviting a representative from Wutai to the WRO council. If we can have bloody AVALANCHE and Shinra sitting in the same room, at least _half_ -civilised with each other, then we can broaden the 'world' aspect of our organisation to... well, the _whole_ of it. Never mind what Miss... ahem, _Lockhart_ has to say about the place. We need to establish good relations with them. They won't attack what is partially theirs."

"How _thoughtful_." The president's bladed sarcasm was his means of refusing the slight to his pride. An olive branch made to Wutai would only further cement his name as the mockery of his ancestors. "However, as Mr. Highwind pointed out yesterday... they won't come crawling out of their mountains so soon."

"Ah sure, _they_ won't," Cid mulled openly. He cushioned the back of his head with his cheap hide gloves, lips pursed pensively. "But I thought y'all were talkin' about those dress-wearin', hilltop loons! The answer's right in front of us, but you're a rotor short of a rudder! It's clear as daylight!"

"Still," Malvern interjected, furrowing his bushy avalanche of a brow. "Someone from Wutai, _here,_ in our homes?"

"Ah, _shut up_!" Cid scathed. "Shut! _Up!_ Fuckin' _goddamn_ it, even when you don't make a point you piss me off! Listen up... you want someone from Wutai here we can trust? Someone who ain't caught up in all the playground politics? Someone who's been _right_ here in the WRO?! Y'all are dumber than Zemzelett shit, she's been _in our homes_ for near enough _two years_ already! She's the best sneak we got, believe me - that little runt's crept up on me like a spell'a _chlamydia_!"

Malvern craned his head up towards the now-stood, proud and defiant Cid Highwind. "You mean...?"

"I mean what I mean, old timer! Get her on the line!"

* * *

Yuffie's sleep had been fitful.

Nightmares preyed upon her again.  
Nightmares of the sewers, of those dead, colourless faces - _hers_ among them.

She'd been with Vincent for nearly three hours, their snug half-embrace something of a spectacle for either of them, and their company had only been dispelled by the rain. He was still aloof, and it was difficult to pry out gems of conversation from his retiring walls, but there was progress. Yuffie's faux pas of the night came when she sniggered at the name 'Grimoire', prompting Vincent to quieten about his heritage, and indeed, for the remainder of their last hour together.

 _Stupid, stupid girl...!_

The phone at her bedside jarred against the wood, stirring her.  
Yuffie's bare foot sprung out from beneath the sheets in reaction, lashing out against the steel of her shuriken.

"Ow, ow, _ow_!" she mewled, tossing around, her toe pulsing virulently. The weapon let out a rattling clangour as it struck against the floor, inundating her sensitive, mid-morning ears to the thunderous ensemble surrounding her. She cupped them. "Aaa- _oww_... Vincent! Vinnie! Vin- damn it, he's not even _here_..."

 _Why did she assume he would be?  
Because she was scared in her sleep? Because she reached out for his reassurance? Was that all?  
_

She was still just a spoilt brat at heart, and she chastised herself for it as she finally summoned the resolve to grope for her phone.

" _Hello_?" Yuffie didn't check the incoming name, holding the device to her ear blindly. Her voice was earthen, groggy, dried from snoring. Snared up in her sheets, the half-dressed princess wriggled her toe to keep its blood flowing smoothly. It burned as if she'd roasted it over a spit.

"Hey, scamp!" Cid barked down the line, "got a job for ya! Get on down to HQ! I'll be waitin' - you better not be in your PJs, all right?!"

" _No,_ " she protested, hitching up the slack strap of her plain camisole. "And how _dare_ you think that! I've been up bright and early this morning, I'll have you know, so don't you question my decency again, old man! I'll be there! Just gimme... half an hour- an _hour_ , tops!"

Cid laughed. To him, the Wutai runt was transparent. "Keep that fire in your belly, kid! You're gonna need it!"

"I'm _NOT_ a kid!"

The phone went dead, and Yuffie howled in frustration to the highest heaven.

* * *

 **A/N:** I had a lot of stuff to iron out this chapter for the coming arc I have in mind, so I hope its weight is okay! Views and feedback are always appreciated, as ever, and thank you if you've reached far enough to read this! Your support for this story keeps me going strong!


	20. XX: Revelations

**XX**

* * *

It had been a diabolical past two hours.

Yuffie had fidgeted, slandered and receded back a decade to elementary smoke mirage lessons. Inside her boots, her hurriedly-drawn up socks were wrinkled and skewed, and she struggled to find comfort. Her bruised toe palpitated throughout the entire meeting, which only further salted her wounds.

"What about those girls, though?" she'd interrupted, only for her point to be muffled beneath a swamp of bureaucratic bull-headedness.

Cid and Barret occasionally crowed out an argument in her favour, and barked at the others to lend their ears to their youngest member, but the remaining three saw nothing in Yuffie but an up-jumped little frog who'd strayed too far from her pond. They disparaged her wherever possible, and shirked her at worst. She had the lungs for battle, that much was certain, and where Lady Amelia in her haughty skepticism had dismissed Yuffie as the token Wutai puppet, the White Rose had unveiled her thorns. They weren't political retorts, though. They weren't insightful, or constructive. They were everything one might have expected from the lone pup out of her element, assaulting looks and not character or mandate. The longer those dreadfully slow hours laboured on, Yuffie had realised how isolating her immaturity was, and how utterly mortifying it had been to confront just how insignificant she was among these Gil-glutted, global elites.

' _Perhaps we should consider the outlawing of all Materia until a safer alternative is available to us?'_ Malvern, that old roach.

 _'Which would mean a prison complex to accommodate the inevitable rise in crime.'_ Rufus, that untrustworthy weasel.

 _'What crime? Are we carrying over Shinra regulations? Don't be ridiculous! We'll need to draw up our own!'_ And Lady Amelia, whom Yuffie despised most of all. That proud, feline face of hers was a temptation to men and slaps alike, with no doubt an inclination towards the latter.

 _'And where are we going to find a legislative body to create them? Who's going to head it?'_ The president's rebuttal was valid, but the youngest council member was becoming restless. She didn't care about all this governmental nonsense. She'd not heeded her father's words, much less these self-important parasites.

"What about the _girls_?" Yuffie repeated, one discourse later. There was stress on her tongue now.  
 _Anything_ to relieve herself of those faces. _All of them, all of those faces; so many faces..._

This was exasperating. These 'minutes' were ego-stroking competitions. Yuffie smouldered among the viper's nest, point-scoring each other on innovative manipulations of the deterioration of society to their advantages. What had begun as the creation of a police force had evolved into a debate on the ethics of introducing them as a universal peace-keeping force across each continent. On and on they drivelled, but the weary Yuffie only had one matter on her mind.

Her patience bowed, strained, and snapped.  
She was the princess of Wutai, an honoured guest at the First Council, and these snakes _would_ listen to her!

Yuffie stood up abruptly, pounded her fists onto the table and shouted, " _what about the girls?!_ "

 _Assertion_. It was her first red-faced step into the world of adulthood, where she wasn't curtsied upon at every corner. It was a rough and uncompromising truth, but one that she took bitterly between the teeth and swallowed down all the same. The attention was rapt upon the _rag-doll prince_ of Wutai. She was owed it.

" _Well_?" Yuffie searched out across her muted audience. "What _about_ 'em? Huh?! Who cares about your stupid ban on Materia!" she glared over towards Lady Amelia's insolent, faint sneer. It enflamed her horribly. "And there's no point callin' yourself a good person and building a massive prison if you let the ones you're helping go off and starve alone in the gutter! You don't even _know_ what they went through! You have _NO_ idea, do you?!"

Amelia suppressed the desire to comment that she'd never claimed to be a good person, nor would she like to become one. There were too many saints and samaritans in this world, although she questioned just what use their generosity and pacifism would have when they were occupying all the graves. Instead, she bit the collective bullet that her peers at the table refused for themselves, and invited this unwelcome presentation on human rights by a mere _teenager_. It was almost insulting to her, but it balanced out well by how ignominious Miss. Kisaragi's incessant _braying_ must have been.

"No," the Head of Defence spoke up, her lilt plagued with condescension. "We don't. Why don't you tell us?"

"All right, _first of all_ we're _indoors_ , lady! So if you wanna be _smug_ , take off those _stupid_ sunglasses already!" Yuffie had attracted a rather vulgar snort of agreement from Cid, and raised the lips of the witch in her deep mauve suit. That only spurred her on, and she continued with real passion, "you know where I was a couple'a days ago?! I was shoved near the edge of this _huge_ drop in the sewers by the Don and fifty or so cronies, and _made_ to look at near enough a _hundred_ drowned bodies! Girls, all thrown away like _trash_ the Don just got _sick_ of! That's been burned into my head and I've had to _live_ with that, so don't you look at me like I'm just some prissy little girl who doesn't know anythin', okay?! I've seen crap this old wart's not even dreamed of in all his _thousand_ years!"

Malvern seemed unfazed, as if the insult hadn't been cast his way.  
He was scarcely conscious on his sharper days, let alone these tedious hours of business.

Lady Amelia's slender, ruby-licked lips pursed, and she entertained the princess's reasoning. After a pause, she found an opening to forward her strategy. "You're quite right. This unsightly weed of ours runs deeper than we'd hoped. All the way, in fact, across the ocean and into your back garden."

That took Yuffie by surprise. All the energy she'd gathered for a clean riposte of her emotional turmoil, and all she could muster was an unintelligible " _huh_?"

" _Wutai_ , my dear," the woman said. "Miss. Lockhart has given us reason to believe that _someone_ from there conspired with the Don. They must have acquired a lot of influence and money to gamble something like that... unless they were already in possession of them."

"You mean-" Yuffie stiffened up, fervent yet bemused, "you can't mean my _dad_?! He'd _never_ do something like that! How _dare_ you...!"

"How are we to know?" Amelia cocked a brow. "Wutai's so secretive these days, and besides... you're a runaway, aren't you? I'll bet you've not spoken to your father in what, two years now? Three? And even then, how did that go? How long were you around? You don't know what he's like. Not really. And neither do we. Which is why, as our chosen representative between the WRO and Wutai, we've chosen _you_ to investigate this matter."

"Why, _you_...!" Yuffie was livid, and refused to sit even when encouraged by Barret's hand. She struck it away, galled. _How could they?_ "This is the only reason I'm even _here_ , isn't it?! You're all just takin' the piss outta me, aren't you?! _All_ of you!" Betrayal misted her eyes. "Well, _forget_ it! I'm NOT your little lap dog!"

"Nobody said you were," Rufus put to her. His cool guise was a contrast to Yuffie's own. "You're a member of our council, being given an opportunity of real responsibility. Here you are, however, throwing a tantrum over a few harsh truths. If you had any respect for Reeve, you'd keep the spirit of his organisation alive and not slit its throat through your childish pride. If you respected those _girls_ , you'd do your duty. You're disgracing not only yourself, but them too."

Yuffie reddened. A throaty call from her left spared her any more floundering embarrassment.

"Hey, how many'a _you_ were livin' in a forest on yer lonesome at _fifteen_?" Cid brought up, to obstinate silence. He blew air through his nose with stringent disdain. "Give the kid a break! Fuckin' needs one after y'all roast her ass for being her age! Weren't none'a _you_ nineteen once?!"

"Children younger than that went into her father's war," Rufus answered.

Cid wasn't retreating from that. "Yeah, an' how many of them came back out?"

"Hey, quit it!" Yuffie's voice wedged between them. She didn't want to admit she was wrong. She was never wrong. It was just that in this instance, perhaps another person was right. It had no bearing on whether or not she had any credibility. "Cid, I told you I'm _not_ a kid! If there's really something fishy goin' on back home then I guess I don't have a choice, right? I don't care what you've gotta say, but I care about what _I've_ gotta do... and I've _gotta_ do _this!_ "

As Yuffie spoke, she only hoped her faith in her homeland wasn't misplaced.

* * *

"O Goddess," chanted Silette; "how radiant is thine purpose! How incandescent is thine name! Hear us now, and grace us!"

Deep within the Mythril Mines, a low, droning choir of her followers were prostrated in prayer. Feverishly the fourteen rose, as though touched by an unholy apparition, before flattening themselves against the rough soil. They were women, each and all of them, tainted with ghastly, wan complexions. Ragged cloths enrobed them, layered and grey as the plumage of geese, ornamented with fulgent baubles and trinkets of condensed Mako spheres. The patterns of bold, turquoise lustre laced across the hunched slatterns in brilliant coils, sweeping and undulating against the frayed gills of fabric from throat to ankle.

The ritual was governed around a natural spring of Mako, which had burst through the earth as a boil upon a leper's skin on Meteorfall. Its luminescence painted bizarre, yet beguiling tapestries of light upon the walls, an ethereal mouth into the Planet's heart itself. Under any other circumstance, it would have been divine.

"...As we now consecrate another to your esteemed judgment..."

Those who were not engaged in the rite were finding festivity of their own, dwelling in the cavern's crevices and shadows. Sleeves were ripped open, exposing unnatural clay-coloured arms made gaunt from Mako exposure, into which they sawed with knives. Coaxing each other, six shared their dripping blades, each one more contaminated than the last, until they'd scored hideous gashes across their forearms in crooning spells of ecstasy. They dug into the flesh, carving insalubrious engravings into themselves, knowing no infection or distrust, knowing nothing but the delirium of their oaths' blood-bondage. The women mashed and embraced their open arm-sores together in a slick, sanguine intercourse, revelling, moaning in their unanimous agony, slaves to their beloved tenets.

 _Blood, their teachings claimed, was human essence.  
They were no humans. Not anymore. __Thus it deserved to be purged from their bodies._

"Our Goddess!" Silette proclaimed, histrionic with delight; "O, Cleansing Goddess! Give us this soul's fate, right or ill!"

Above the Mako spring was a wooden ducking stool, which lowered towards it. A young woman was fettered to the seat by her wrists, deep-seated terror inking the pits beneath her wet eyes. She fought against the bindings helplessly, but it had been days since she'd eaten and she was frail with hunger; her imposed fast by her captors was insurance against greed, said to be an adulteration of their ritual. A metal band was nailed into the stool, fastened over her stomach.

"Please, _don't_!" begged the prisoner in hysterics; "please... _please_ , I don't want to do this anymore, I'm _scared_...! Oh, Gaia, _please_...!"

The prisoner flinched against the miraculous warmth of the Mako pool, her feet crinkled tight in anticipation. _No,_ she panicked, _not like this... I didn't want this!_ Her sobs were smothered by the babbling, black mantras of the congregation, unheard amidst their madness. There was nothing she could do. Down to her shins she was plunged into the source, the wretch at the other end of the seesaw's planks loosening its load stone by stone. It burned. Blisters festered across her legs, and she screamed out something almost entirely inhuman when the spring drank the melted flesh of her toes. The depths swallowed her up.

And she laughed. She laughed until she'd drowned.  
The mind-broken, soulless cackle of one who had simply _given up_.

"We beseech you, O Goddess, take this mortal vessel as your own!" Silette implored to the pond, which rippled and effervesced from the young woman's delirium beneath it. "Claim this meagre form and return to us, we pray! By the gravity of our One Sin, come to us once again and cleanse this Planet...!"

The bubbles stopped, yet on they chanted.  
 _Ten minutes, twenty..._

The stout winch-crone bloated the ducking stool's sack with its stones, gradually rebirthing their victim. What arose from the spring was a half-being, a mutant of creation. Its skin had warped into a prickly exoskeleton that resembled rock, the blisters and boils having set into tough, orange scales. Its lungs were bloated with Mako energy, raw and unrefined, which had rendered the creature scarcely cognisant. Its eyes were prominent, glowing chasms buried among the ruins.

"She has forsaken us!" cried out one of the commune, throwing her slashed arms up in dejection. "Why, O Goddess, why...?!"

"No," Silette called out, studying the remains of what had once been a genial farm girl. "Don't worry! This is a sign. Our Lady has deemed this body unworthy, that's all! It is an expendable, _sinful_ body; this girl is _impure_ and a _liar_! Naughty thing... Our righteous Mother cannot inhabit the some lowborn _harlot_!"

"Then what must we do, Grand Beau?" another sought, against a mumbling, rhythmic backdrop; " _whore... whore... whore..."_

"We'll have to purify it, won't we? Mm, yes." Their leader mused, stroking her chin. With sudden elation, Silette pronounced, "Kill the whore, everybody!"

The great, tumescent winch-crone pivoted the stool's arms around and relieved herself of its weight, stumbling back in awe of her own muscle. The seat had almost splintered beneath the impact, and shuddered beneath the mutant's abominable presence. The cult was upon it with knife and frenzy, sinking dagger-fangs deep into junctions between its blotchy abscesses, puncturing its eyes in sticky, gelatinous webs that clung onto the filthy metal like glow-worm trails.

It didn't respond.  
It didn't cry, or wail, nor did it retaliate or vow hatred or fear.

A new-born with no comprehension of the world, the creature bled out, thrust by thrust.

Grand Beau Silette peered into the Mako spring, the wet strokes of falling blades continuing to echo throughout the cavern. Upon another failed sacrifice, she extended out her left arm, the forearm of which was laced with thirteen straight, tallied scars. She poised her own slim knife beneath the pulsing cluster of veins there, lamenting the unspoken gulf between herself and her Goddess from the Skies. A _Calamity_ , they called her; how little they understood...

With a crude, swift slice and a fluid red shroud, now there were fourteen.

* * *

 **A/N:** Update - there are now official chapter titles! Some are more esoteric than others, but they're the ones that carry the most symbolism if you manage to catch their references. I hope you're all continuing to enjoy this story, and thank you all once again for your thoughtful and kind comments!


	21. XXI: Lost Haven

**XXI**

* * *

"No!" Tifa cupped her hand over her mouth, distraught by the news. "No, there _has_ to be a way...!"

"I'm so sorry, Miss. Lockhart," came the doctor's earnest affirmation. "I wish there were, but even with the most advanced medical technology available to us... I'm afraid Denzel won't make it through the week." The heartbreak in her eyes brought sorrow to his own. "His condition is simply beyond our hands."

Tifa's hands took fistfuls of the doctor's lapels, bundling until they were as white as snow from the pressure. "What'll it take?! Blood? _Transplants_? Take mine - take _whatever_ you need, I don't care! Please, please don't let him go; you can't, he doesn't deserve this...! He's fought so _hard_ , he...!"

Cloud rested his palm on her shoulder, and Tifa's clasp upon the coat slipped away as feeble as a breeze. The doctor tightened his lips in commiseration. He promptly took his leave with a weight to his chest, sharing with Cloud an unspoken glimpse of understanding. If it hung heavily in him, then he'd dread to have imagined the scale of devastation that had now woken within the couple. He wasn't entirely sure whether it was a possibility.

Tifa turned into Cloud, and they brought one another into a consoling embrace. All of their disputes and disagreements were so trivial in comparison to the impending, inevitable loss of the very life that had gelled them as a family in the first place. She'd wept so much these past few days that upon hearing the worst, there was almost nothing left except a chilling silence. She willed them away, as much as it hurt her she willed herself dry, because soon she'd never see Denzel again and she knew, down in her wounded depths that shedding a tear would only sully his memory. It was not what that sweet, enduring young boy would have ever wished for either of them and she _knew_ that, but she was watching Denzel slowly fading away. She would not foster a ghost.

 _("Am I gonna die?"_

 _"No. No, I won't let you. Okay?"_

 _"Promise?"_

 _"All right. I promise.")_

"I _promised_ him, Cloud! Gaia, I promised him the fucking _world_! I promised him he wouldn't _die_!" Tifa confided into her other half's chest, "but he _is_ , and there's _nothing_ we can do! I was supposed to be a mother to him, not some worthless _liar_ who lets him slip away without a fight! This isn't a fight we can just swing a sword at, and be done with it!" Her arms hugged onto Cloud with such ardour her fears that he would fade too were tangible; if her promise was unbound, then how many more would be? In solace, he drew her closer; if only his solace could extend beyond that. "Oh Cloud, what have I _done_...?"

"You made a promise to him," he offered powerlessly, unwelcome shades of the past encroaching into his thoughts. "So we'll find a way. We always do."

That _way_ came in the unlikeliest of confidants. They had come to a discussion on the Forgotten Capital, which might have contained abstract cures left behind by Cetra healers. If human technology would fail Denzel, then Tifa determined that Ancient practises were their only option. Cloud had contested that the length of time it would take may have exacerbated their boy's condition, but he'd been reminded that it was all they had to go on. Tifa was on the verge of commandeering one of Cid's airships alone, when the echo of rapping knuckles upon the door hushed them.

"Come in," bid Tifa. No doubt it was one of their friends, and the dire news was to be their new burden.

Instead however, Lady Amelia ambled into the room. The clacking of her prosthetic foot was out of tandem with her cane, as she struggled to manoeuvre around the slight space between the handle and the wall. Her aspects had affected a seriousness far remote from her meeting-room slices of antagonism and vanity.

"I've just been speaking to your doctor," explained Amelia. Her voice was deep and smoky, a sultry sort of melody that one might hear in a burlesque performance. Behind her shades, hidden eyes roamed fleetingly across the would-be corpse of the Midgar orphan. As he languished there, Denzel was clad in sterilised bandages that made him entirely anonymous. Amelia pursed her lips. She despised children; snotty, errant, unprincipled leeches. Still, her façade was marvellous. "It's truly terrible news. I wouldn't have wished it upon my worst enemy, and believe _me_ I have a few."

"Well, you've said your peace," dismissed Cloud. He was wary of this woman. His instinct didn't settle well around her. There was something unnatural about the Defence Project of hers - whether it was the 'Nova' of its name, or its tampering with long-dead sentinels of the Planet - that baited out Cloud's disdain for her.

"You think I came here to _gloat_? I'm half-dead myself," Amelia knocked her foot against the tiles pointedly. "Although I do hate unfinished business. I myself would much rather be certainly alive, or certainly dead than linger in this unsightly limbo. Still, I'm not here for me. I'm here for the boy."

"You go near him, and you'll look back on that hobble of yours as a _luxury_...!" Tifa flexed her fist, still tempered from her earlier battles.

"I don't want to go _near_ him," the Councillor of Defence pinched her nose at the prospect of it. "I want to offer you the means of saving this poor thing's life."

"Why?" Tifa's fingers hung limp at her sides again, her aggression ebbing as easily as it had accumulated. "Why would you...?"

"Who _cares_ why?" was Amelia's blunt response, tossing aside a shawl of luscious black locks. "Whether it's to further my own name, or that I'm simply just a wonderful person... who _cares_ , really? All you need to know is that the Nova Defence Project can give little, what was it... _Denzel_ here a chance."

"Yeah," Cloud snubbed, "heard all about that. Ain't happening."

"Fine." Amelia scoffed at the former mercenary's reputable stubbornness. "I'm not much of a groveller, so I'll see myself out."

"Wait," Tifa stepped forward, discarding her partner's position with her own doubts. Solidarity hadn't meant much to Cloud when he'd ridden off to _who-knew-where_ for the _umpteenth_ time in a month, all development after the Remnant incident seemingly regressed from inactivity. She'd be damned if his cold-shoulder treatment and past traumas were going to cost them the only earthly glimmer of hope left for Denzel's recovery. She could feel the intensity of Cloud's glare like a lens of sunlight against her cheek, but she remained steadfast and ignored his unspoken caution. "What are you going to do? What _chance_?"

Amelia paused mid-leave, amused by the visible rift between them. "I'm sure you're familiar with the WEAPONs. Well, the NDP's salvaged some of their remains. We're building a ring of them around the globe, insulating the Planet from any possible future outbreaks of Jenova. Unfortunately, we've encountered a few problems; the WEAPON parts still recognise humans as a threat, and they're responding rather poorly to our tests."

"What are you going to _do_ to _Denzel_?" repeated Tifa cautiously, the climate of her words mirroring her gradual empathy towards Cloud's view.

"As far as I understand it," Amelia unravelled her string of thoughts aloud; "he's a survivor of Geostigma, isn't he? It's only a hypothesis at the moment, but our leading scientists seem to think that we might have a chance of success by wiring the scraps of the WEAPONs up to the biological template of a Geostigma survivor. Rumour has it that their systems aren't just cleansed of Geostigma, but they're still outright _hostile_ to Jenova cells. We could use that to our advantage. With a good enough sample, we might be able to instil that same instinctive hostility towards Jenova in the WEAPON parts. Denzel's contribution may make the difference."

"Why?" Tifa turned a blind eye to the swordsman's loud, disgruntled sigh. He wasn't listening to any of this, crossed his legs over at the ankles and folded his arms with his trademark, introverted mental aversion. He wasn't subjecting Denzel to any experiments, and that was the end of it. Tifa knew. Yet still, she inquired on. "Why Denzel? What makes him so special? Why can't you use another Geostigma survivor? There's already hundreds of them!"

"You're right, there are." Amelia was forthright, as one ought to have been in her business. "There's nothing _special_ about Denzel, dear, only what a mother can be proud of. The idea was raised not long ago, you see, and we're currently poking around for volunteers..."

" _Guinea pigs_ ," Tifa corrected sharply. "You want Denzel to be some _guinea pig_?!"

"I want Denzel to have a _chance_ ," the other woman rebuffed. "I'm sure you do, too."

" _Don't_ you twist my feelings!" rebounded Tifa with a growl; she was bristled after the Junon affair. "Don't you _dare!_ You _know_ what Denzel means to us - you know this isn't an easy decision for any self-respecting person! You're asking us to _choose_ between certain death and _maybe_ death? A mother should never have to make that choice! It's _cruel_...!"

"Debate ethics in your _own_ time," Amelia deflected with a shrug. "It doesn't matter to _me_ if you turn down my offer. Like I said, we've got plenty of potential candidates. Come to me before six o'clock tonight; I have a flight to the Corel region soon after, so I'm afraid if you dawdle I'll assume you've backed out."

"Four and a half _hours_?" Tifa was bemused. "You're giving us _four and a half hours_ to decide Denzel's fate for him?!"

"Small lives mean small talk," Amelia completed her turn towards the door at last. "And you're _wasting_ it bargaining with me. Honestly, I don't even know why you're still thinking about it. The choice is easy; if you don't take up my proposal, well... it's as good as wringing his neck yourself. Anyway, the Corel Reactor won't collapse by itself," she craned the handle. With not a shred of sympathy, the ever-hubristic woman didn't hang on a farewell. "So, _ta-ta_ for now."

"Not a chance," Cloud was as gruff and impregnable as always. "I'm not putting Denzel through all that; I don't trust her. If he passes on, he goes naturally."

" _None_ of this is natural!" Tifa singled that out, whipping around towards him in tempestuous flame. "For Gaia's sake, Cloud! _Look_ at him!"

"We're not talkin' about this again." Cloud rose from his seat in a squeal of its metal legs, refusing to acknowledge the depth of Denzel's injuries. If he inhaled that sight again, he wasn't sure how much longer his willpower would last. Tifa was fully aware of his stance on experiments and tampering with organic matter, most of all on or of those who were considerable family to him. Why she persisted in harassing him was beyond him. "It's _done_. Denzel's _not_ gonna suffer."

"So that's _it_?" she looked upon Cloud as if he'd struck her. "Look, I know what you've gone through but-"

"You have no idea," he cut in.

"Yes, I _do_!" Tifa fought back; "or was everything I did for you back in Mideel all for nothing? Remember that, Cloud? I was _right_ there with you, _right there_ inside your memories, and I went through _everything_ with you! I helped you find yourself! Not that ex-SOLDIER, not that heartless mercenary... but _Cloud_! Cloud from Nibelheim; Cloud my _friend,_ and Cloud the one I _love_! So don't you throw that shit my way, 'cause it's _not_ gonna work! Like it or not, I know you just as well as you know yourself - and nothing in that head of yours gives you any reason to deny Denzel the only opportunity he's got left to keep on living!"

"What, so you can guarantee me that woman's gonna look after Denzel?" Cloud wasn't persuaded. "You know what they're gonna do to him?"

"So let's find out," she suggested, a fleeting brightness to her. "What's wrong with that? At the very least we could find out a bit more, right?"

"A couple of years ago you gave up everything to fight Shinra," said Cloud. "Now, you wanna get involved with a woman who walks, talks and acts like Shinra 2.0? I don't get it. You'd never have considered this back then... so what's _changed_ , Tifa?"

" _Everything's_ changed, Cloud! People have come and gone, and we finally found something for ourselves... we have a _family_ , and one I love, all right?" Even as she battled on, her serrated edges shrank away to emotion. "I love you _both_... and we've been through enough together to be torn apart over this now, haven't we? You're telling me you won't even try? If we're bringing up the past, you wandered across the world to do what you thought was right - and now, _this_?"

"That's just _it_ , though," contested Cloud, not altogether unmoved by Tifa's confession. "It's _not_ right. Never has been. You can talk about our family as much as you like, it still doesn't change a thing. I'd never let anyone I love become some living gearbox for the toys of a power-hungry company, and neither would you."

Tifa, on the cusp of a reply, found it in her judgment to bite her tongue. This was useless. They'd been bickering for weeks now: small, fruitless spats from finances to groceries that were far more meaningless and carried much less significance in their lives, but there had been nothing of this magnitude. It put their squabbles into perspective, which was the only positive element to have emerged from this abysmal decline. Tifa retreated back a step, treading towards the hospital room window. Perhaps some fresh air would have remedied her muddled mind, but she doubted it. She doubted a lot, these days.

"I don't want to lose him, Cloud," she admitted in her misery. "I want to be able to say I did everything I could to keep him alive, here with us... and for him to grow up one day and say, ' _I'm a survivor!_ ' I..." her voice cracked, "I'm being selfish, aren't I? Imagine what _he'd_ want. I'm such an _idiot_!"

"For us to fight tooth and nail, whatever the cost?" Cloud managed a short breath of mirth, as cynical as it was. If they couldn't break through to one another, then perhaps they'd find the best of both worlds in investigating this Nova Defence Project episode - however ominous it was. "I think you're forgetting what bad influences we are on him. But who knows, maybe digging up a little something on this _Nova Defence_ baloney might not be the end of the world..."

* * *

 **A/N:** Update! While this story's technically 'on hiatus', I'm by no means dropping or moving away from it. I have a very important visit coming up soon that I'm excited for, so I'm going to be working on a few upcoming chapters and combing back over past ones to make sure it's not contradicting itself. I'm going to be untying some creative knots for myself, smoothing out some ideas, and making sure it works. I have some _very_ big plans for this! Thanks for reading so far!


	22. XXII: In The Headlights

**XXII**

* * *

Lady Amelia leaned against the fringe of what had once been Reeve's desk, and her fingers - smooth and unblemished from years of command - roamed along its surface. Each stroke was another cross through Reeve's memory, as if in her gross self-admiration the developer of the Nova Project was staking her claws deeper into the new world's crown of authority. His carefully-organised documents had been filed away into the shelves, and all that which occupied the polished mahogany desktop was a simple ashtray. From her affliction it had accumulated a mound of ash, giving the impression of a shattered snow-globe.

"I'm so pleased you could join me. Really, I am." Amelia's off-handed sarcasm was as superficial as her acts of philanthropy, and all three of them - herself, Cloud Strife and Tifa Lockhart - knew it. Its dishonesty hung, a pervasive venom in the air. "You're such sweethearts."

"Shut up." Cloud brooked no argument, but the couple's performance of solidarity together was just another weak mirage that didn't elude the businesswoman's gaze. She was shrewd and hawkish, keen to the scent of vulnerability and discord. "So we give you Denzel. What then?"

"Oh, my. You're really giving this serious thought aren't you?" Amelia's smile was merely a sly hint of one, never allowing it to fully mature.

"Answer him!" It was Tifa's turn to challenge the witch, loudly and impatiently. A sense of urgency was stabbing into her, sinking deeper by the second.

"The chances are, he'll _survive_." Her attention drifted onto lighting her slender pipe, and only when content with its aroma - the subtle, enchanting flavours of Gongaga yellow-wilt* - did she continue, albeit as half-heartedly as before. "Given all the risks, I'd say it's a good opportunity to keep the brat around."

"What _risks_?" Tifa's lip curled, keeping her vitriol scarcely at bay.

Amelia's breath was tinged with strands of smoky lavender. "Like I said before, the NDP is a global operation. The WEAPON parts are stationed all over Gaia. The consequences of the enormous strain on Denzel's mind and body are impossible to predict." With another draw of her pipe, Amelia rolled her shoulder in a blasé gesture. "I can't tell you much more than that; it's not even that you're unauthorised, it's that we've not run these tests on a living body before. _Sorry_."

"On a _living_ body," Cloud caught. "What do you mean by that?"

"Our scientists tried to test the compatibility of Geostigma victims and WEAPONs. They introduced a sample taken from a corpse into some reanimated WEAPON tissue." Amelia hummed with dissatisfaction towards the light in the others' eyes. "Note the ' _tried_ ', dears. The WEAPON tissue rejected the sample, developing a particularly nasty disease as a result. We had to quarantine and destroy it, but... all research is useful research, in the end."

" _Reanimated_?" Tifa was bemused. "Just how deep does this all go? Now you're reviving _dead_ things?!"

"Obviously not as a _whole_ ," replied Amelia. "I was funded by Shinra some time ago to conduct these experiments on victims of the Wutai War, using Mako energy to compensate for blood. I'm sure you've heard of the 'M-Pulse' inside human beings. Well, we just replaced their ordinary vascular system with a supply of Mako; in short, it's nothing more than what Shinra advertised it as in the first place: an _energy_ source." She caught their disapproval, blowing wind through her nose sharply. "Oh, don't look at me like that. Save your moral tripe for someone who _cares_."

"So you're gonna do the same to Denzel, then? Is that it?" Tifa hissed. Perhaps Cloud wasn't wrong. Likely the process this despicable woman had described would have drained Denzel of his blood, to replace it with that malignant energy from the earth itself. She wasn't about to allow that.

"Goodness, _no_." For once, the martial artist found herself grateful for Amelia's flat affronts even if it did run under her skin all the same. "Quite similar, though. Since the boy's _alive_ ," she resisted the compulsion to mention ' _for now_ ', "the whole procedure would be yet another unnecessary risk. Just over a year ago now, we excavated the remains of a WEAPON from the badlands outside the Gold Saucer. Its heart has since proven to be a powerful generator when stimulated..."

"So you'd hook Denzel up to a WEAPON's heart and siphon off its life force," Cloud summarised without enthusiasm. As much as the woman complained about Hojo's company, the pair of them would have collaborated like a house on fire. His disparagement wasn't complete. He added, "find someone else. We're done."

Amelia brushed her fingertip against the pipe's head, sloughing off its dying cinders. "Oh, well. What about you then, Miss. Lockhart?"

The explanations had rocked Tifa, down to the very foundations of her being. She couldn't have imagined a worse predicament for herself: betray her ethics, betray all that she and her friends had fought for those years ago, and betray principles that had made her who she was; or betray the faith and life of her adopted son whose existence had been both brief and harrowing. If she accepted this, she'd earn the ire of everyone with whom she'd cooperated. She'd turn her back on Barret, on AVALANCHE, and even on herself, but Denzel would _survive._ In what state, at what cost however, she simply couldn't be sure.

"Letting him go now," wondered Tifa, "letting him be at peace for good... I can't even bear the thought of him disappearing from us, Cloud! But then if we _do_ let him live, he might suffer for years to come... we might make his life not even worth it, and that's _just_ as horrible! There's no way we can make a right choice!"

"Let me put it this way," said Cloud, pinning Amelia with an accusatory glance. "He wouldn't _be_ alive. He'd be a cog, a lab rat... he'd just be another gear in their machine. It's tough, I know. It's damn tough. But if we took up this chance, it would only be because we'd buckle to a hope that's not even there to begin with."

Finally, Tifa's honeyed, lying dreams relented and she gave in. "You're right. Damn it, Cloud, you're right. I won't let Denzel die, but putting him through all that agony for some operation we don't even know will work... that's what would _really_ be like killing him ourselves, Amelia! Little mercy is better than none!"

"Well, haven't you told _me_." The businesswoman, rejected, loped around towards the cushioned hide of Reeve's old chair. The distinct taps of her leg against the varnished wood brought a metronomic air to her movements. "Stellar arguments, both of you. Very predictable ones, too."

"And that's all you've got to say?" Tifa asked, distrustful of the other's acceptance.

"I said you're predictable," Amelia reiterated slowly. Even through her sunglasses, one could perceive a menacing glimmer. "Isn't that enough? _Guards_!"

" _Shit_ ," growled Cloud, palming the hilt of his enormous blade. Beside him, Tifa pulled her gloves taut around her fingers, fixing Amelia with odious contempt. They shared in the chilling revelation of their own stupidity, their learned skepticism softened over the past few months.

The door swept open into a row of rifles, their barrel-heads pointillistic against the grey background of NDP personnel armour.

Lady Amelia's smile blossomed into full, insidious adulthood. Relishing the transformation of her guests' expressions, she dismissed her subordinates with a brush of her hand. "Get them! Arrest them... or _kill_ them trying!"

"Fight through 'em," Cloud called to his lover, who had swept her attention back towards that familiar laugh. "Get to Denzel...!" The rattle of emptying gun chambers crackled throughout the room, riddling it with a dull metal cacophony. Cloud whirled his weapon to the left, then fanned it out to the right, deflecting the barrage. As he swung his blade forward, Tifa leapt upon its gleaming body and barrelled through the enemies gathered in the doorway. Her fist drove through the back-most guard's visor, as laces of blood and orange-glass shrapnel cast the illusion that she knelt within a three-dimensional tapestry. While the others twisted to follow her movements, her leg speared up and caught another between his chin-piece and armoured jacket. The soldier staggered back, choking, onto the tremendous steeple of Cloud's sword. In a bloody torrent, Cloud slung the carcass aside and clove downward through a second foe.

Blistering through the mob of NDP soldiers in the ensuing upheaval, Cloud and Tifa sprinted towards the stairwell. Alarms and gunshots haunted their every step, pelting the walls and floor with pock-marks of steaming metal chips. Each heart-beat was a second closer to Denzel, each cherished more than the last.

Reaching the stairwell door, Tifa wrenched it open. A bullet ricocheted off the handle and chewed into her upper arm as she held it for Cloud to pass through, eliciting a torrid mewl of agony from her. A searing flash hit her vision, dulling it, her grip slipping from the ruddy rivulet slithering down her wrist. Tifa's nerves were aglow and her pupils seized from the shock, faltering just long enough for the guards to close in around her.

"Tifa!" Cloud hung beside her, the echoes of a dozen NDP personnel flooding the stairwell beating upon his ears.

"Go on, hurry!" Tifa urged, wrestling against the pain. She forced a nod, looking to Cloud's left towards the public access staircase. "Forget the stairwell, take _that_ instead! They can't, ugh... take their chances as easily if there's a lot of other people around!"

"I'm not about to give you up too," resolved Cloud, who began to tug at her uninjured arm in earnest. "Come on, your legs can't have stopped as well!"

Forcing herself onward with a heavy shrug, Tifa accompanied Cloud down the adjacent corridor. She nursed her wound, dappling the tiles with her blood. Pale, she winced to sharpen her vision, catching only the sight of silhouettes bloating the window spaces of the twin doors ahead. They were cornered.

"Just as well," Amelia eased through the forest of guards to the pair's rear. "You're bleeding out. At this rate, throwing you into a cell would do you some good... Kya-ha-ha!"

Cloud sank the tooth of his sword into the floor, splintering it upon entry. It was as sheathed as it could ever be, a symbol of his temporary surrender. Not even a First-Class SOLDIER could outlast against superior numbers, a fact that had been ingrained into his mind ever since that fateful day outside Midgar. As much of a mentor as he'd become to Denzel, Cloud didn't feel in a position to become anyone's martyr. Tifa, likewise, swallowed her dignity and didn't resist their arrest.

As the guards enclosed around him and Tifa with handcuffs, Cloud spied through the window a helicopter taking to the skies.

What he didn't see, however, was Denzel's dying body captured inside it.

* * *

Yuffie reached the shores of Wutai in the early hours of the next day, long after her friends had been incarcerated.

The young ninja stumbled down the stairs of their company plane, hugging onto the rail. Her skin was a sickly sallow shade, each ambling step an awkward flirt with serious injury. Descending behind her was a far more dignified figure, clad in sweeping reds: Vincent Valentine.

Before them congregated Wutai's finest, including the five Pagoda sages, who were assembled upon the shoreline. Torches outlined their figures, melting all into a single, unrecognisable black swell that occasionally rippled and contoured against the sea breeze. Their heiress was infamously flighty, and some had reasoned that they might never witness her ascension to queen in their lifetime; their agitation was reasonable, if not natural. It was a tradition for the first-born to assume their place as ruler upon their twentieth birthday so that their leaders would never succumb to dementia or become senile; it was an act of refreshment and rebirth, for which the Sea God Leviathan played an integral role. The five sages of the Pagoda, her father included, knew in their hearts that this custom was the next in line to be desecrated by his iconoclastic offspring.

"My beloved daughter," proclaimed Godo, his arms raised in affection. Despite having aged into his fifties, his stature was as impressive as the indomitable Da-Chao Statue that towered proudly above the village. His robes were long and woven from a deep navy silk, hemmed with texts of Wutai legend.

"Urp... _old man_." Yuffie gagged, keeping her sights upon the colourless sand as she teetered queasily.

"You're sick?" Godo asked, stopping shy of arm's reach.

Yuffie nodded, but she found no consolation in her father. The Wutai elder lunged towards her, delivering a sudden, stiff swat of his hand upon the girl's head. It was a callous blow, something one would usually reprimand a parent for, but the citizens of Wutai stood by idly in silence. The clap resonated loudly, but instead of a whimper of recoil, Yuffie snarled and bolted a retaliatory fist into her father's cheek. The wound grew thick and ruddy, throwing Godo back into a stagger.

"Ahh," he hissed, cupping the raw blemish. His hand rose into the air, a fist now, and punched the sky with vigour. "Spirit!"

"Not sickness!" Yuffie recited, newly impassioned.

"Power!" Godo roared, thundering another attack towards her.

"Not weakness!" Yuffie replied in tune, snaking her fingers around her father's wrist. Her illness had vanished now, and was overcome by a wide, plucky grin.

"That's my girl!" answered Godo, satisfied with her condition. He lowered his hand in tandem with Yuffie's, each eyeing the other with the caution of enemies. Their movements were tedious, measured, each reliving the dire hours of training that the village leader had impressed upon the thief. "Now, then...!"

Mid-way through his next - rather ignorant - breath, Yuffie pounded him squarely in the gut.

"You've gotten soft, you old coot!"

"I, guh..." Godo clenched his hand over the twinge of knots in his stomach, hunched and panting loudly. "Perhaps I should educate you then, Yuffie, on what it truly means to be 'soft'! In this battle of ours, the only victor shall be the one who tastes breath! OMNI-...!"

"Lord Godo," interrupted Gorky, the portly if genial guardian of the Pagoda. "Perhaps now isn't the best time..."

Godo's lifted arm froze and then retracted with the grace of a reprimanded teenager. The whispered commotion behind him only further weighed upon his decision, and so he conceded this once to allow his blood and heir to live another day. "So it would seem. Who is this man with you? I've seen him before..."

"My name is Vincent Valentine." The man in question presented himself by drawing his cloak across in a theatrical yet somewhat needless gesture.

The master of the Pagoda and ruler of the once-great nation of Wutai glanced over towards his daughter, silently seeking for her aid. It seemed that it wasn't that his memory was particularly foggy, but instead that this shadowy man was - despite his bizarre appearance - terribly forgettable.

"Ugh! Are you _kidding_ me, dad?!" Yuffie wasn't going to grant him help. She wasn't _that_ charitable. "He was _right_ next to me the last time I was here!"

"It's irrelevant," interjected Vincent in his uncaring monotone. "We're here to investigate Wutai's involvement with a series of crimes in the Eastern Continent."

A shiver of gasps ran through the Wutai people present. Yuffie turned towards her companion, her expression riddled with shock. "Woah, way to break it to 'em gently Vinnie, jeez! Not cool! You barely talk, and the first thing that comes outta that frowny hole is a bombshell like that?! Man, you're still full of surprises!"

"An infamous trafficker and degenerate by the codename Owl was in possession of your Leviathan Materia," Vincent continued, undaunted. "What do you know?"

"You'd have me stand here on my own soil and listen to you call me a _conspirator_?" Godo's earlier warmth had withered considerably, resurrecting the image of a man who'd staked his life and legacy on a valiant war against a superpower. His anger appeared to channel the individual indignations of those who were equally outraged to hear that their still-recovering nation had been defamed by such a claim. "Leviathan be damned! I had nothing to do with it!"

"But you held onto the Leviathan Materia for decades," Yuffie pointed out. "Even away from the Shinra's hands! You sayin' it got _stolen_?!"

"Now my own _daughter_ stands against me!" Godo snorted. His discomfort was visible through cracks in his reaction, and with all her heart Yuffie wished that she hadn't caught them. It rooted sorrow inside her to see him writhe under the unexpected pressure of interrogation. "What about the others, then? Aren't you going to shine your third-degrees into their eyes, too? Chekhov, perhaps, with all of her arcane knowledge... or once-beaten Staniv, the Master of Weapons?"

"What _about_ the others?" Yuffie argued, her experiences both recent and over a term of years with the others toughening her voice. She'd always suffered from that sliver of immaturity that had prevented her peers from taking her with a pinch of gravity, but now that she'd found her own two feet in the world the thief was in no position to give way to anyone. She'd witnessed those girls first-hand, and their unforgivable treatment; neither lies nor family would assuage her. "Tell me the _truth_ , dad," she planted her foot onto the ground, as firmly as her developing sense of conviction. "Tell me what happened!"

"A man who unlawfully took our sacred materia has been found and punished, I presume." Hearing him defend himself brought upon Yuffie the same sense of unctuousness as there had been around the WRO table. Onward Godo deflected, his lips tightened to stone. "And that's all we in Wutai happen to know."

"We," copied Yuffie, who surveyed the still spectres of those who thronged behind her father. "Wait, it's ' _we_ ' now? Huh?"

"He means this whole nation is complicit in what's going on," Vincent observed. "A second uprising, or more appropriately... a dance on Shinra's grave."

Godo stood before his followers, a beat of laughter caught dry and miserable in his throat. His kindly demeanour was washed away by something altogether more sinister and untrustworthy, a phantom of the man that Yuffie had known and grown up with. "Prove it. But in the meantime, you must both be starving!"

* * *

* **Yellow-wilt** \- A type of plant local to the Gongaga region that, when crushed and properly prepared, mimics the taste and effects of tobacco. However, it has been shown to be a lot healthier substitute since its discovery as a smoking substance fifty years ago. It's also popular because of its sweeter, flowery scent when smoked, as opposed to the mustier, stronger odour of tobacco.


	23. XVIII: Twice Wounded

**XXIII**

* * *

"This is the second time we've been locked up together," Cloud recalled without a trace of emotion. Tifa could sense his bitter humour, and glanced scoldingly over towards the delivery boy who was lounging upon the stiff, gunmetal protrusion that was to be their bed.

"It's not a good time to joke around Cloud," she reproached, fraught with worry. The bullet-wound had been cleaned, but it rubbed awkwardly beneath the laps of bandages girdling her arm and was a persistent, sore company in her consternation. She was sleep-deprived, upset, and far more emotional than she believed herself ought to have been. In short, Tifa was both disappointed with herself for being so short-sighted and weak, and livid with those who had freely toyed with the only child she dared think herself ever able to care for as her own. "Denzel's out there, dying or dead, and we can't do a _thing_ to help him!"

"I'm being serious," he contested, no more than an idle grumble to her ears. "We got locked up once before, but we got out just fine. Right?"

"Well, I'd say the circumstances are pretty different now." She scrutinised the door for a moment, but with advances in technology she couldn't tell whether the small, circular holes were for air or keys. Her search having become fruitless, Tifa rested her arms upon her chest and swirled upon her heel to face Cloud.

"Only thing that's different is you bein' a drag," her partner answered bluntly. "C'mon, Tifa. I get that things have been a wild ride lately, but if we gave ourselves up to misery like this all those years ago then this whole planet would be history. Go ahead and turn back on everything we've built our lives on if you wanna, but I'm stickin' to hope." There was a cold, sardonic exhale through his nostrils at the sound of his own voice. "Weird sayin' that, but it's true."

"Look at you all grown up," Tifa canted her head, tone wry yet inspired. "Mr. Leader-of-the-Pack. You got a plan?"

"Nope." Cloud butchered her dawning optimism with a single, honest stroke. "Not a damn clue."

"Oh, Cloud! You're impossible!" Tifa bemoaned, slumping down onto the edge of their makeshift bed.

From down the hallway, the familiar clacking of a certain insufferable woman's artificial limb became audible. The hollow applause resonated for several beats, one steadily accompanying another in succession, as though the wretched mare still hadn't become acclimatised to her disability. At last, their captor rapped upon the layered steel of their cell door, her mocking voice a dagger to their ears.

"Knock, knock, dears." The dull scarlet light around the entrance flashed a light willow colour, and Lady Amelia hobbled in. She was flanked by three guards, each wielding the same make of rifles that had scored deep into Tifa's flesh hours ago. "Am I interrupting your escape scheme? I apologise."

"You _bitch_!" growled Tifa, slicing her strong hand across Amelia's cheek. "Give him back! Give us Denzel, right now, or so help me...!" The sting was palpable even to Cloud, and startled the guards to attention. When Tifa marched forward to follow-up with a swift jab to the harpy's jawline, Cloud roped his arm around hers. He restrained her back against him, the mutual struggle torrid yet short-lived. Cloud could feel the heat exuding from his lover, nettled by powerful rage.

"Ugh!" Amelia growled. She readjusted her sunglasses and brushed her fingers against the sweltering mark left there, as though it had been slander. Her underlings raised their weapons to unfairly reciprocate the act, but to the room's amazement Amelia whipped up her other hand. "Wait! Stop. If this presumptuous little hussy wants to _die_ so much, like that _tumour_ she calls her son, then it'll be by my _own_ hands...!"

"What have you got against us, anyway?!" Tifa cried, her limits with this woman well and truly broken. "I don't even know who you _are_!"

"Don't be silly. Of course you do," Amelia scoffed.

" _We've_ _never_ _met_ ," Tifa reaffirmed, harsher now.

Amelia slashed a judicious backhand across Tifa's face, the bony knots of her knuckles whistling aside. Tifa's head rocked to the side, her thoughts empty but for a molten engine of hatred towards the other. She found her fury mounting, festering like the wrath of the Planet until Cloud once again wrested her back against himself. The martial artist's eyes glowered through her fringe like a caged beast, all essence of decorum and dignity wasted on the NDP founder.

There was nothing left of that now.  
There was herself, Cloud, and that lost, dying boy from the graveyard of the slums.  
That was what mattered, and that was what was being threatened to be stripped from her.

"You don't recall this little exchange of ours? I myself find hitting that whore face of yours quite the rush of nostalgia," the woman who styled herself as Amelia revealed with a glowing smile.

"You can't- you can't mean," Tifa was at a loss. "You're...?"

"...Scarlet," Cloud finished, narrowing his Mako-rich eyes upon Shinra's former Head of Weapons Development. His custody over Tifa was no longer for her own benefit, but for his own too; he brought her snug against himself, the lean muscles of his arms fastened around her waist and shoulder joint.

"You left me for dead inside that wreckage," the once-blonde egomaniac confirmed. "Had I not the sense to wear some protection, I'd have suffered the same messy fate as Heidegger. I always was the smartest between us, that bloated old stoat... but surviving wasn't as easy as all that."

"Maybe you should've taken the hint," Tifa snapped.

"Things grew pretty unsightly in Midgar," Scarlet recalled, paying her nemesis no heed. "Days, maybe even weeks later I found myself in some sort of tent, far outside the city. All I heard was some prattle about an 'exodus', some mass evacuation to what was then the new, small settlement of Edge. Thanks to you and your friends, they hacked off my leg, rebuilt my throat, and lanced my eyes with lasers just to keep me going. Cheap surgery in the wasteland," she clucked her tongue, sneering at the indecency of her treatment. A shade of spite caught in the noise: spiteful towards the so-called _heroes_ of this world. "That was what I was worth, apparently. Some plastic limb, this raspy voice and eyes that can't bear light... ah, my retirement gifts. I do _love_ them so."

"Save the pity party," Cloud spoke up, icy to the bone. "No-one cares."

"Kya-ha-ha!" Scarlet spat with ill humour. "Oh, you don't change! But neither do I. I'll do anything to win. If that includes dangling a knife over the rope that holds your boy's neck, then so be it. You're _my_ prisoners now, and there won't be a WEAPON attack to ruin this for me... so why don't you both play nice?"

Tifa bit down upon her tongue, resisting the urge to exacerbate the pair's troubles.

"And if you promise," Scarlet issued smugly, "I'll take you along to see your beloved Denzel."

* * *

Dawn ebbed over the skies of Wutai in an anaemic pallet of colours, thieved of their richness. Not even the westernmost continent of Gaia could escape the onset of winter, and its usually-luscious backdrop had been worn down into a poor facsimile, appearing as the pages of a children's book decades past its use.

"Yuffie, you must know I had no idea what these men were doing," her father implored. His voice was as weary as the autumn atmosphere. He and his daughter had been debating the ethics of the Wutai revenge plan for the remainder of the night, and as bull-headed as they both were neither accepted compromise.

"Because you didn't _care_!" Yuffie returned fire. Vincent, who had been nothing short of scenery to this point, noticed the harm in her body language; the visceral quality of her memories, which he had been unable to prevent. Yuffie pressed on, her point as inexhaustible as the scar in her mind; "you didn't _care_ , dad - you never did! Not about _me_ , not about _mom_ , and now you don't give a shit about all the people you're supposedly saving from the Shinra! You're _worthless_!"

"We've gone over this," Godo said, as stubborn as iron. "It's _our_ people I put first. I did what I did to get _Materia_ , Yuffie, to build our _strength_!"

"Strength you'll throw away when everyone _dies_ fightin' this stupid war anyway!" Yuffie thrust herself up from her cushion, her pulse erupting. "I thought you didn't even want this, anyway! Where'd this come from all of a sudden?! Last time I came here, you were stuck up in this room suckin' your thumb!"

"I didn't, but your words resonated within me." Godo obeyed his composure, despite the temptation to meet Yuffie at her own level. "So I went out into the village. I went out into the wilderness, into homes and businesses, and I heard what the people called for. I heard their stories, and my own losses blended with their own. We understood each other, for the first time in over twenty years, Yuffie. They wanted _justice_ , and so did I... all along, so did I...!"

"Don't you make this about what _I_ said!" shouted Yuffie, rheumy-eyed with passion; "don't you _dare_! You know I love you, dad - I'd do _anything_ for Wutai if it ever came down to it... but why'd you cut a deal with scumbags like _that_?! Why'd you keep this whole thing tucked away instead, like some dirty little secret?!"

"We didn't need an _army_ , Yuffie," argued the Wutai patriarch. "We needed _Materia_. We needed _money_. Our land is barren, Yuffie; we've got no means of finding Materia naturally ourselves! I did what I had do to, and did things I'm not proud of, all for us! All for our people! Can't you see that?!"

"All I can see is what they did to those girls!" The thief was in uproar, the horrors spilling fresh and bare once more. "That's _all_ I can see, and knowing you're just lyin' back all the way over here, rubbing your hands as the payloads float on in... you're as bad as the Shinra! What kind of a dad can be like _you_?!"

"What do you _think_ would happen to those girls after a war, anyway? What do you think happened to our lovers, daughters and families after the last war?!" Godo clenched his hands, his arms as twin pillars in support of his arched musculature that pulsed with incredulity and ire. "What do you think happened to your mother?! War isn't all bloodshed and glory, you little fool! If you led our nation into battle against the dying Shinra, then are you saying you'd stop all the torture and assault women in the cities and farms would suffer from our victory?! Are you truly that deluded - that _ignorant_?!"

"I'd cut the heads off every single one who tried it, yeah!" Yuffie battled back in vain, swarmed by disconcertion. "I wouldn't just let it happen!"

"Then you're an _idiot_!" Godo's voice scorched, unwelcome images of his wife's final years. They'd claimed it as illness to preserve her honour at the funeral, but its insidious cause was never specified by public record. Shinra had given her that illness. The culprits were too numerous, too anonymous to punish individually, so he'd attributed it to the entire nation. He beheld the fruit of his marriage with an unbidden ferocity, in realisation that his indoctrination had come far too late.

Vincent, overlooking this conflict, wondered where precisely these shipments of Materia were kept. The two before him could exchange verbal blows and dispute the squalid truths of war until the sun dissolved into dusk a hundred times over, but it was the Materia that attracted his interest.

The door to the sacred fifth tier of the Pagoda slid aside in haste, torn open by none other than Sacred Gorky.

"Lord Godo," the vigil of Wutai's proud tower interrupted, a veil of sweat greased over his bald head. "Forgive me, but it's the Materia...! You must come now!"

"The Materia... what?" Godo had betrayed his conversation with Yuffie, leaving her in baffled offence as he rushed for the stairs. "What is it?!"

"There's something wrong," both Yuffie and Vincent heard Gorky reply with, before he and her father were beyond earshot in muffled unrest.

"We'd better follow," Vincent suggested. To her dismay, Yuffie was loath to agree with him.

When the gunslinger and his partner had reached the lowest floor, they discovered Godo and his sage gathered by the entrance. Why they weren't moving any further was a mystery to the investigators, until they joined them and concluded that it was through terror that neither of them dared set another foot forward.

Before them, shambling towards the village, was a grotesque mutant. It bore the faint semblance of humanity, but its pigment had become coarse and stony. A crumbling wing of stiff, dead flesh sprouted from its back, as though its ribs had swelled and emerged in a rotten scythe. Its gait was uneven and lop-sided, its right arm having transformed into a leak of pregnant, oozing tentacles, which slithered upon the ground. Behind them, they left an unctuous, green stain.

"Leviathan's blood," cursed Godo. "What _is_ that?!"

"He was caught trying to steal our Materia," Gorky explained. "That's all, until we interrogated him this morning..."

"What happened this morning?" The Wutai elder spoke for them all.

"It was bizarre," the sage floundered for words, a cleric who'd been testament to the insurgence of a devil. "A magician, we first thought. A trickster, no more. He was shifting his body into ours, mimicking us. We thought it was a ploy, some sad attempt at flaunting what he'd stolen from us... however, the sages' forms possess only the ability to enhance our power. When he moved between us, he was more than that... he was _us_ , down to every last cell of memory..."

 _That ability,_ Vincent suspected in disquietude. _Impossible..._

"Where are the other sages?" asked the crimson-clad gunman.

"I-I couldn't tell you," panicked Gorky. "They stayed behind to contain him, when he became _this_..."

"You will have to rethink your strategy," Vincent revealed to an astounded Godo. "Because this may spell the end for your people."

* * *

Scarlet led the handcuffed couple into a vast chamber. To Cloud it appeared as if they'd travelled into the disembowelled core of a reactor: the layout was domed in design, and at five equal points around them were the foundations of immense, bowed bio-mechanical limbs. Their heads fused as one into the ceiling, while the sloped walls around them gave the impression of a metropolis at twilight with incalculable amounts of computer monitors. In the centre of the room was a tiered command hub, and above that was suspended the static heart of Ruby WEAPON; an ironclad, undead trophy of human conquest.

Upon her entrance, a man of overwhelming build and bearing an unnatural, stitched appearance lumbered closer to her. His shadow darkened all three of them.

"Ah, Hawk." Scarlet was one of very few who were unaffected by her underling's presence. "Did you dispose of the contaminated Materia?"

"Exactly as ordered." The bass reverberations of his throat were glutted with pride. "It's Wutai's problem now."


End file.
